What is BONK in Crypto? A Guide on the Viral New Dog Meme Coin
BONK is a Solana-based dog meme coin with over 110 DeFi, gaming, developer, and exchange integrations, transforming from a quirky airdrop to select Solana holders into a viral memecoin spiking over 25,000% in a single year.
The Bonk story has all the narrative elements of a tech thriller– a Christmas airdrop to the Solana community in the midst of a particular brutal crypto winter, turned Cinderalla story giving early airdrop recipients a taste of multigenerational wealth.
BONK bills itself as “The Dog Coin of the People” and was initially launched to Solana holders as a free airdrop on Christmas 2022. Since then, BONK has been added to the world’s largest exchanges, Coinbase and Binance, and minted many BONK millionaires off a free airdrop.
According to Bonk’s website, “BONK’s adoption has since grown parabolically to emerge as the true community coin of web3.”
Is this the story of an underdog to the top dog of the memecoin world?
Is BONK just Z-Gen Dogecoin?
It might not be as mindless as many people have made meme coins out to be. The Bonk team is actually shipping product, such as over 115 integrations spanning including DeFi, developer, and gaming verticals– there’s even a Bonk first-person shooter where people can earn BONK by picking up orbs.
In a half hour, the first of the @bonk_inu events will begin.
Simply have your Bonk character skin equipped and you will be able to pick up these spinning Bonk orbs in deathmatch. Each orb is 8 million bonk which goes straight to your wallet.
Good luck! pic.twitter.com/CWzUG2vmge
— ev.io (@play_evio) May 31, 2023
Let’s explore all the above and more in CoinCentral’s Guide on Bonk.
What is BONK Crypto: The New Hot Dog on the Blockchain
You’re here for one reason.
Not in search of novel technology. You came because you saw a random coin called BONK start trending, get listed on Coinbase, and go up 25,622.23% in a year.
We don’t blame you. (That’s a real number, by the way. )
BONK was born in the harsh bear market winter winds of December 2022. The crypto market had been decimated by the Luna, Celsius, BlockFi, and FTX blowups. Solana’s close ties with FTX sent it into a faster spiral– SOL was trading at about $8, down 97% from its peak of about $260.
And then came BONK, a dog-themed memecoin drawing inspiration from the original BONK memes, featuring a dog character, Cheems, being bonked on the head. Tragically, the dog on whom Cheems was based, passed away in a battle with cancer.
He didn’t even get to see BONK get listed on Coinbase 🙁
Pivoting from the Bonk meme’s sad lore back to crypto BONK, the dog-themed coin was airdropped to Solana network participants. Anyone from folks in the Solana DeFi ecosystem or SOL-based NFT collectors and artists, and developers got some BONK thrown their way.
LamportDAO devs received about 5% of the total token supply– about $300 per dev valued at over $500,000 today.
Upon heading over to the BONK website, the project begins to feel different from what might be dismissed as just another crypto meme.
Does the site look like you’re trapped inside a big McDonald’s M? Sure. But there’s more to it than meets the eye.
BONK Tokenomics and Distribution
BONK has a maximum supply of 100,000,000,000,000 BONK– that’s 100 trillion BONK. Currently, about 60% of its maximum supply is issued, so about 61,837,624,528,359 BONK.
A single BONK has hovered around $0.00002943 and $0.000001943.
The BONK Team
The creation of Bonk is credited to a core team of 20 Solana developers and builders, who launched BONK to inspire the Solana ecosystem in post-FTX times.
BONK DeFi: Can You Stake Bonk?
BONK is fairly well integrated into the SOL DeFi ecosystem, enabling holders to use their BONK in a wide variety of decentralized finance schemes.
A few notable ways you can use your BONK in DeFi include:
- Solend: Lend and earn or borrow with $BONK
- BONKomatic: Stake $SOL and earn $BONK
- Coin Rabbit: Use your $BONK as collateral to get loans from Coin Rabbit
- Liquify: Convert NFTs into $BONK
But that’s not all– BONK has even made its way into the crypto-gaming world.
BONK Gaming: Is BONK Play-to-Earn?
BONK’s low value-per-token is prime for gaming. Earning BONK rewards in various games feels real but isn’t high-value enough to force the project into an inflationary spiral– a challenge many GameFi projects find themselves succumbing to.
Here are a few BONK gaming applications:
- DOGE Track: Use $BONK to race doges at a dogetrack
- Dead Ruby Studios: a free-to-play arcade game where players can search for treasure ($BONK)
- Evio: A first-person shoot-to-earn game.
BONK vs. DOGE vs. SHIBU
BONK is currently the runt of the dog meme coin litter, having just touched a $2B market cap.
Dogecoin (DOGE), the top dog meme coin, hit a $70B market cap at its highest in 2021.
SHIB hit a $43B market cap in 2021.
Each dog coin has a different pedigree.
DOGE launched at the end of 2013; its code was copied from a new-defunct coin called Luckycoin, which was a fork of Litecoin (LTC), which was itself a fork of Bitcoin (BTC). In 2014, the Dogecoin mining process was integrated with Litecoin’s mining process, allowing miners to mine both Litecoin and Dogecoin without extra work.
SHIB is an ERC-20 token on the Ethereum blockchain.
BONK is is a Solana token.
Both BONK and SHIB were created with exceptionally high supply leading to a very low cost per individual coin, which social sentiment tends to favor.
A single BONK costs about $0.00002869, effectively making any BONK holder with over $30 of the coin a “BONKillionaire”– holders of millions, hundreds of millions, and billions of BONK.
DOGE, comparatively, has primarily priced within the confines of $0.01 to $1.00.
How to Claim BONK: Warning– Don’t Get Scammed
The BONK airdrop was distributed to NFT collectors, devs, and early Openbook traders (a Solana DEX).
If you simply just had SOL in your wallet or were staking it, you unfortunately did not qualify.
Is it too late to claim your BONK on Solana?
The airdrop is over, so yes, it’s too late to claim BONK. The most likely case is that you had some Solana-based NFTs, and you should check your Phantom wallet or whatever Solana wallet you use for the airdrop. If it’s not in there, you most likely did not get it.
Don’t fall for any scams or links trying to get you to sign away access to your private keys.
There are dozens of articles being pumped with links to scam versions of BONK, do not click these and FOMO into getting malware or all of your coins stolen. AI is making it very cheap to produce legit-sounding content with fake links rapidly.
The official Bonk website is: https://bonkcoin.com/
The official Bonk Twitter is: https://twitter.com/bonk_inu
Final Thoughts: Is Bonk Here to Stay?
Wrapping up our journey into the world of BONK, we find ourselves at the intersection of silly, heads-down bear market innovation and the sheer unpredictability of the cryptocurrency universe.
Folks urgently looking up “BONK crypto” or “BONK price prediction” may be pleasantly intrigued that there is more to the project than meets the eye.
Bonk’s integration into the Solana ecosystem is fairly robust, and support of the project (especially after minting a few millionaires) has grown.
Each token isn’t worth a whole lot at the current price of $0.00002006, but when you have millions or billions of them stashed in a wallet, it can really add up.
BONK’s meteoric rise, from a free air drop to a millionaire-maker, is a testament to the unpredictable nature of the cryptocurrency market, as well as a story about community. BONK’s integration into Solana’s DeFi and gaming dapps is a savvy market play, helping set a higher bar for new digital currencies, memecoin or not.
Still, as much as we can esteem BONK’s favorable features and effects, we’re reminded of the harsh reality that BONK may very well bust as soon as it boomed like thousands of tokens before it.
Whether BONK is destined for success among comparable projects like DOGE and SHIB, or it’s fated to be a footnote in crypto history, its story is undeniably a reinvigorating breath of air for a cryptocurrency community battered by the months-long sequence of bad news in 2022.
