- Bonk is a meme currency that was launched by Solana on Christmas Day
- It has risen to close to 2,500%
- Solana has been dissolved by Bankman-Fried, top projects fleeing blockchain, and the association with Bankman-Fried
- Our Analyst states that this isn’t the climate for memcoin hysteria
Woah! This is a throwback. Twitter is buzzing this week over Bonk, the Solana blockchain’s doggy token. It’s a bit nostalgic to talk about a classic meme token. We only need a COVID mask, some Elon Musk tweets and we’d be back in 2020.
Since Christmas Day, the price of the Shiba Inu themed token has increased by close to 2500%. As I type this, the price has risen by 150% in the hour since then.
The interesting thing is that the token was launched on Solana. Solana has struggled for months. Yesterday I did a detailed dive into the demise and struggles of Solana. There were many top projects that fled the blockchain, multiple outages that caused massive problems, and the ominous connection with Sam Bankman Fried, which led to the price dropping.
While it’s still very low, Solana has seen a slight rebound in tandem with Bonk’s surge. It rose above $13 Tuesday after having dropped to $8 last week. Coinglass data shows that there have been nearly $7 million in short positions liquidated. This is the highest amount since November’s collapse of FTX.
The surge in interest in Bonk seems to have helped the Layer 1. Bonk announced an airdrop of 50% to boost hype about the coin. It has worked – Bonk now has a market cap of $120 million and is following the meme coin playbook perfectly.
What is the reason Bonk is rising?
It is hard to determine how bonk did this, just like any other meme coin. Marketing and luck are the key factors. Bonk is a payment token that has been used in a lot of Solana projects. $BONK is a trending topic on Twitter.
All of it amounts to the same hysteria as the last few years. Meme coins are a gamble, as everyone knows. What makes this unusual is the fact that the rise isn’t just happening at a bearish time for Solana but for the whole market.
Interest rates have risen and liquidity has been pulled out of the market over the past year. Risk assets have collapsed. Meme coins are the most extreme risk asset on the market, and have sunk as a result.
What’s next for Bonk
Any investor or gambler, Bonk is a dangerous game. It is similar to meme coins. This coin has no utility and will likely drop to zero over the long term.
We are not talking about memes, but everyone knows that. But in the current tight monetary policy environment, the hysteria of the pandemic, where stimulus-cheque-wielding retail investors were pumping everything within sight, is long gone. This is not the right climate to gamble on meme coins.