Late Tuesday, the market cap of BONK reached a record $4.4 billion, making it the largest memecoin native to the Solana blockchain.
BONK is based on a viral 2019 meme in which a Shiba Inu dog gets struck on the head with a baseball bat or hammer.
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Posted November 20, 2024 at 3:42 pm EST.
Dog-inspired memecoin BONK continues to set new all-time highs in price, and has also generated a 24-hour trading volume on Coinbase that exceeds tokens with substantially higher market caps such as XRP, SOL, and ADA.
Coinbase’s trading volume for the Solana-based BONK over the last 24 hours currently stands at roughly $256 million, making up 4.2% of the exchange’s total volume. That’s more than that generated for XRP ($253 million), SOL ($239 million), and ADA ($106 million), data from CoinGecko shows.
From October to November month-to-date, BONK volume flowing through exchange infrastructure provider 0x has increased roughly 350% from about $300,000 in October to approximately $1.5 million, according to Scott Guenther, head of finance at 0x. Guenther noted that the increased volume “gives us the insight that users are somewhat risk-on.”
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BONK’s increased trading volume in the last 24 hours comes as the memecoin reached an all-time high in price of $0.00005825 and a market cap of roughly $4.4 billion late Tuesday; its market cap has since settled at roughly $3.7 billion. By comparison, Solana’s market cap is nearly $110 billion, while XRP’s is almost $62 billion and ADA’s is roughly $29 billion.
As for why BONK is seeing larger trading volumes than these top-10 tokens by market cap, Nicolai Søndergaard, a research analyst at blockchain analytics firm Nansen, said it might simply be the token’s turn in the spotlight during this meme-focused cycle. “Solana already saw a nice run-up,” Søndergaard said. “I think BONK as a community meme token potentially could see that as well, because it hasn’t really seen the same love, I’d say, compared to a lot of the other meme tokens in this current run.”
Søndergaard also argued that BONK’s rally highlights a persistent interest in older animal-based tokens because the animals are easy to relate to, whether they’re funny, cute, or just a great story. BONK was inspired by a 2019 meme referring to a Shiba Inu getting hit on the head with baseball bats and hammers.
“I think that’s why it’s something that you see just coming back also because we still have a lot of people who continue trading, but also people who are probably coming back now who were in at the last time,” Søndergaard said. “[Animals are] part of what they remember.”
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According to block explorer Solscan, the number of BONK holders stands at 821,091, more than quadruple the holder count of Solana’s second-largest memecoin, dogwifhat (WIF) at 200,404.“I think that the number of holders [and] the distribution of tokens, to some extent, helps with whether [a token’s rise is] a community-led pump or [gamed by] some insider[s],” Guillaume Lambert, the CEO of trading platform Panoptic, told Unchained.
BONK was initially rolled out at the end of 2022, a brutal year for the Solana ecosystem which saw the price of the SOL token tumble to below $10 owing to its strong relationship with disgraced FTX founder and CEO Sam Bankman-Fried.
The large holder count of BONK can be attributed to its community airdrop and its role in revitalizing Solana, Suki Yang, founder of memecoin platform LMAO, told Unchained. “BONK arguably kind of saved Solana from the bottom of the bear market,” Yang said.
