BONK: From Meme Coin to Utility Flywheel

Original Title: BONK: From Meme Coin to Utility Flywheel

Original Author: BONK

Original source:

Reprinted: Mars Finance

Key points

· Bonk was launched at the end of 2022, during a low period for Solana after the FTX crash. The project distributed 50% of its total supply of 1 trillion tokens, becoming one of the largest airdrops on Solana (approximately 500 trillion BONK distributed to about 297,000 wallets).

Initially launched as a Meme token, Bonk quickly gained widespread adoption in the Solana ecosystem, now integrated into over 400 applications across DeFi, NFT, gaming, and payment sectors. Nearly 1 million wallet addresses hold BONK, reflecting strong community acceptance.

· The difference between BONK and traditional short-lived meme coins is that it has built a fee-driven burn mechanism and DAO-led burn events. Applications such as BonkBot and Bonk.fun contribute to most of the burn volume, while further reducing the circulating supply through Bonk Rewards' lock-up and large events like BURNmas. As a result, the total supply of BONK has decreased from 1 trillion to approximately 880 billion.

· BONK has transformed from a grassroots meme coin into a financial asset. Osprey Bonk Trust, the upcoming Bonk ETF, and Safety Shot restructured into the Bonk treasury company, show that the pathways for traditional investors to gain exposure are steadily increasing. These tools reduce circulating supply while also bringing new risks associated with capital flows, regulatory scrutiny, and market perception.

The origin and issuance of BONK

The concept of Bonk was born at the end of 2022, when the Solana ecosystem was in a downturn due to the collapse of FTX. The price of Solana plummeted from around $36 before the crisis to less than $10, and its DeFi activity and TVL (Total Value Locked) also sharply declined. The broader crypto market was in a deep bear market, with Bitcoin and Ethereum both falling to multi-year lows. Meanwhile, meme coins like DOGE and SHIB, which had surged in 2021, gradually lost their popularity by the end of 2022, and the market increasingly doubted the long-term value of most altcoins, especially meme coins.

Against this backdrop, the concept of Bonk has emerged, aiming to serve as a community-driven Solana Meme coin, uniting community strength and revitalizing the morale of Solana.

BONK officially launched on December 25, 2022, positioning itself as “the dog coin for the masses on Solana.” During the issuance process, there was no private placement or VC financing; instead, 50% of the total supply of 1 trillion tokens was airdropped to active Solana ecosystem users, covering nearly 300,000 wallet addresses. This airdrop is one of the largest in Solana's history, targeting the core community to maximize grassroots user participation.

The clear goal of this airdrop is to reward the active Solana community at the time, covering multiple groups within the ecosystem. It is worth noting that core Solana developers also received a small amount of BONK airdrop as a token of appreciation. The wide distribution quickly made BONK one of the most widely held tokens on Solana.

Most of the token supply enters circulation immediately after issuance, with only 21% of the early contributor allocation using a linear unlocking mechanism, unlocking starting from the end of December 2022. The remaining small portion of locked assets will gradually be unlocked in the coming months until January 2026. Another significant portion of the project-related tokens is 16% allocated to BonkDAO.

BonkDAO is initially managed by a committee composed of 11 community members and core contributors, which controls the multi-signature account of the DAO treasury. The DAO commits to gradually achieving decentralization and will open community voting in July 2024 to propose the destruction of BONK collected by BonkBot, and ultimately integrate the Solana governance platform Realms for community governance voting. Many of BonkDAO's proposals revolve around marketing campaign incentives and various token destructions (such as Burnmas, BonkBot destruction, and November destruction).

The launch of BONK was accompanied by a surge in speculative interest, and the token was immediately available for trading on Solana DEX. Multiple centralized exchanges quickly listed BONK, including Coinbase, Binance, OKX, Huobi, MEXC, Bybit, and Gate, all of which completed their listings in the first week of January 2023. This exchange support helped BONK achieve a market capitalization of hundreds of millions of dollars within weeks.

However, the initial airdrop and launch hype gradually faded by mid-year, until the end of 2023 when Solana welcomed a broader Meme coin craze, with new tokens like WIF gaining attention, but BONK still maintained its flagship Meme coin status on Solana and significantly rebounded during this period. By the end of 2023, BONK had firmly established its core position in the Solana ecosystem, with its price movements often synchronized with SOL, but with higher volatility.

Integration and Application

From start to finish, Bonk's strategy is to deeply integrate into the Solana ecosystem, with two main purposes:

1. Gain and maintain community attention

2. Create diversified application scenarios to reduce the circulation of BONK through transaction fees or destruction mechanisms.

The following are the main integrations and applications of BONK:

Decentralized Exchange Platforms and Liquidity Pools (January 2023): DEX on Solana quickly embraced BONK, with Orca and Raydium being the first to launch BONK liquidity pools and provide incentive rewards. Additionally, a BONK-branded DEX—BonkSwap—also emerged in early 2023.

Trading Robot - BonkBot (Mid 2023): One of the most influential applications in the Bonk ecosystem is BonkBot, a Telegram trading robot that we mentioned in our previous trading robot industry report. BonkBot allows users to trade any Solana token through a chat interface, charging a 1% transaction fee, with 10% of that used for repurchasing and burning BONK. During the Solana meme coin craze at the beginning of 2024, BonkBot was the leading trading robot for several months in a row. Although growth in the trading robot sector has since stagnated, its core users continue to contribute stable fee income, thereby supporting the destruction of BONK.

Token Issuance Platform – Bonk.fun (Q2 2025): Following the launch of the modular issuance platform LaunchLab on Raydium, Graphite Protocol has partnered with BONK to launch Bonk.fun, a Bonk-themed issuance platform built on the LaunchLab product. Similar to Pump.fun, Bonk.fun allows anyone to issue new SPL coins without permission and is highly inclined towards Meme coin activities.

Bonk.fun quickly sparked a craze after its launch, with daily trading volume exceeding $400 million within weeks. The hype then receded over the next few months, until early July when Bonk.fun suddenly surpassed Pump.fun, capturing over 60% of the trading volume on the Solana issuance platform during its peak.

Similar to BonkBot, Bonk.fun will use a portion of the platform's transaction fees to buy back and burn BONK. We will discuss the impact of these main destruction drivers in more detail in the following chapters.

Game – Bonk Arena (June 2025): Bonk enters the GameFi space with Bonk Arena, an “earn by killing” arcade shooter developed by Bravo Ready. Bonk Arena will launch in June 2025 and is a web/browser game where players need to pay 10,000 BONK (approximately $0.15 at launch) to enter the deathmatch, and defeating opponents allows them to win their BONK stakes. The BONK used in the game has 50% allocated for token burn, BONK staking rewards, and charitable donations. Bonk Arena can be accessed directly through the Phantom wallet and plans to launch on Solana's Saga phone and PSG1 gaming handheld.

Fitness App – Moonwalk (2024–2025): Moonwalk is one of the first “Real World Incentive (RWA-Fitness)” applications in the BONK ecosystem, gamifying fitness activities to enable users to earn on-chain rewards through daily activities like walking and running. The long-term goal of Moonwalk is to expand the user base for Web3 fitness and convert the average user's daily exercise into on-chain behavioral data, bringing more authentic user demand and healthy growth metrics to the entire BONK ecosystem. With Moonwalk, Bonk is no longer limited to social or trading applications but enters the realm of “real-world use cases,” further broadening the appeal of BONK beyond Web3.

Digital Art – Exchange Art: Exchange Art is one of the largest digital art and NFT trading platforms on Solana. In 2025, BONK will collaborate with Solana to launch the Crycol Gallery (New York) in the real world, and all gallery works will be listed on Exchange Art, achieving a “online + offline” art display closed loop. Exchange Art supports artists in accepting BONK as a currency for purchases and integrates BONK-related art themes in certain events, making BONK a part of Solana's NFT culture.

Charity – Buddies for PAWS: Buddies for PAWS is BONK's global animal charity program, supporting multiple animal protection organizations through a “community donation + BONK official 1:1 matching” approach. This program reinforces BONK's narrative of “from the community, for the community,” expands BONK's international influence, and conveys positive brand values to the traditional world. Although donations do not directly lead to destruction, they indirectly enhance BONK's social acceptance and long-term value stickiness through the elevation of BONK culture and media dissemination.

Cross-chain bridges: As Bonk grows, it begins to expand to other chains. Cross-chain bridges like Wormhole enable BONK to circulate on chains such as Ethereum, BNB Chain, Base, and more. By 2025, BONK will be available on 13 blockchains through cross-chain bridges or wrapped tokens, significantly enhancing accessibility. However, Solana remains the core chain for BONK activities.

Multi-chain deployment: Bonk is also exploring the launch of DeFi products on different blockchain platforms. Recent plans include the launch of BONAD on Monad, a meme coin issuance platform similar to Bonk.fun. In the future, the redeployment or expansion of Bonk products to more blockchain ecosystems may further increase the buyback and destruction pressure of BONK.

This extensive integration demonstrates that Bonk is not merely positioned as a Meme coin. By embedding the token into various application scenarios, Bonk is committed to creating organic demand that goes beyond pure retail speculation.

Supply-side evidence: “Deflationary Dogecoin”

Almost all Meme coins gradually disappear after their initial popularity fades, but the Bonk community chooses to shift towards building a sustainable ecosystem. By 2024, a new narrative begins to take shape: “BONK is not just a Meme coin,” with its core being the revenue from transaction fees and the token burn mechanism.

Fee Generation and Distribution

As mentioned earlier, BonkBot and Bonk.fun are the most influential applications driving the application fees used for BONK buybacks and burns.

BonkBot charges a fixed 1% transaction fee for each transaction:

· 10% of it is used for market repurchase of BONK and destruction.

· An additional 10% transferred to the BonkDAO multi-signature wallet

Therefore, 20% of all fees from BonkBot directly benefit BONK holders—half through permanent burn, and the other half accumulated through the DAO (so far these funds have ultimately been used for burning via governance proposals).

So far, BonkBot has generated over $87M in transaction fees, with approximately $8.7M used for BONK burn and another $8.7M accumulated to the DAO. Although 2024 is a highlight year for BonkBot, recent trading volume and fees have clearly declined. The transaction fees over the past 30 days were about $667k, which means an annualized BONK burn of approximately $810k (if the 10% allocated to the DAO is also used for burn, the total could reach $1.6M).

In addition to BonkBot, Bonk.fun became an important driver for BONK burn in mid-2025. The platform charges a 1% transaction fee on Bonding Curve-based trading volume. As of August 11, Bonk.fun allocated 50% of the transaction fees for market buybacks and BONK burn, after which the ratio was adjusted to 35%, but Safety Shot committed to reinvesting 90% of its 10% revenue share into purchasing BONK, resulting in an actual buyback and burn ratio of 44%.

As shown in the figure, Bonk.fun experienced a surge in trading volume in July and surpassed Pump.fun in market share, generating over $37M in revenue just in July, with 50% allocated for BONK burns. However, since July, the activity and revenue of Bonk.fun have declined by more than 90%. The revenue over the past 30 days is about $812k, which means that with a 35% burn rate, the annualized BONK burn is approximately $3.5M (considering the reinvestment of Safety Shot, the actual burn pressure may be higher).

The other applications in the Bonk ecosystem are relatively niche, but they typically follow the same pattern: a portion of the transaction fees is used for repurchasing and burning BONK. These applications include BonkSwap, Bonk Arena, Bonk Validator, and other Bonk-related applications or integrations.

The key conclusion is:

· The burning pressure of Bonk almost entirely comes from the success of BonkBot and Bonk.fun.

· The impact of various small applications on the overall destruction rate is negligible.

Nevertheless, the Bonk core team and community continue to launch new Bonk-related applications, games, and integrations, which create possibilities for new sources of BONK supply reduction in the future.

Self-destruction and lock-up mechanism

In addition to the main Bonk-related applications, another major source of destruction comes from DAO voting, events, and community/cultural decisions.

· Bonk DAO Burn: The DAO will regularly propose to burn tokens accumulated in the treasury through revenue sharing. For example, the decision to burn approximately 278 billion BONK in April 2024 was made by a committee vote, while the burn of approximately 84 billion BONK in July 2024 was decided by a community vote (any holder can temporarily stake BONK to participate in the vote).

· Activity Burn (like BURNmas): BURNmas is an incentive-based marketing campaign where the DAO commits to burning different amounts of BONK based on tweets and other social interactions. From November 15, 2024, to December 24, 2024, the DAO and community will burn tokens daily, aiming for a total of 1 trillion BONK, with an actual final burn of 1.69 trillion BONK.

· DeGods distribution destruction: The entire DeGods airdrop allocation (500 billion BONK) was destroyed in January 2023. As a Solana NFT project, DeGods was initially included in the BONK airdrop, but after its announcement to migrate to Ethereum, the community and the Bonk team unanimously decided to destroy that allocation.

In addition to the burn mechanism, Bonk launched the Bonk Rewards lock-up (staking) mechanism in mid-2024 to encourage long-term holding. Users can choose a lock-up period ranging from 1 month to 1 year, with longer periods yielding higher reward multiples. In return, locked-up users will receive a share of the Bonk Rewards pool, which is funded by the Bonk ecosystem's income, with rewards primarily in USDC, supplemented by a small amount of BONK, and distributed regularly.

Currently, approximately 3.5 trillion BONK are locked, accounting for about 4% of the total supply.

Demand-side driven: Integration with traditional financial products

Osprey Bonk Trust, launched by Osprey Funds in October 2024, is a Delaware Grantor Trust designed to provide U.S. accredited investors with passive exposure to BONK without the need to hold tokens directly. The trust is issued in a private placement format of 506©, with a minimum investment amount of $10,000, charging an annual management fee of 2.5%, and operates as a closed-end structure (direct redemptions of shares are not permitted).

As of November 21, 2025, the trust holds approximately $20.2M in assets, corresponding to 10.97 million shares, each supported by about 209,000 BONK.

The trust currently holds approximately 2.3 trillion BONK, accounting for about 2.6% of the total supply, which is a significant share that has been locked long-term and removed from the market. Osprey stated that once the time and asset requirements for listing on OTCQX are met, they plan to list the trust for trading, providing public market investors with a trading method similar to Grayscale GBTC's stock code. However, before the official listing, liquidity is only achieved through regular private placements, and due to the lack of a redemption mechanism, the following risks exist:

1. Cannot be redeemed, shares can only be traded in the secondary market.

2. After listing, there may be premium or discount trading, and this risk has historical cases in similar closed-end funds (such as GBTC).

Alongside the trust, Osprey has partnered with REX Shares to apply for the Bonk ETF, which will directly hold BONK and offer daily subscriptions/redemptions in the primary market. Multiple Rex-Osprey Meme coin ETFs, including BONK, TRUMP, and DOGE, are expected to start trading after passing the SEC's 75-day review window on September 12.

In addition, Tuttle Capital is advancing a 2x leveraged Bonk ETF and other leveraged crypto ETFs, but SEC approval is still uncertain. If approved, these ETFs will provide compliant investment channels listed on trading platforms for BONK, potentially bringing marginal capital inflows. Notably, when news of the 2x Bonk ETF surfaced in July 2025, the price of BONK rose approximately 10% in a single day, indicating that the market expects a more convenient access method to boost demand. Ultimately, the actual impact of these products will need to wait for trading to go live and observe capital inflow conditions.

In August 2025, the health beverage company Safety Shot, based in Florida, restructured to become the first publicly listed BONK Digital Asset Treasury Company (DATCO), with BONK as its core treasury asset. The company commits to purchasing up to $115M BONK (approximately 4-5% of the total supply), with the first acquisition of $25M completed in collaboration with BonkDAO, and receiving a 10% revenue share from Bonk.fun. The company then changed its name to Bonk, Inc. (NASDAQ: BNKK) to strengthen its association with the BONK ecosystem.

Bonk, Inc. raised funds through convertible preferred shares and ATM issuance to purchase and hold BONK, committing to reinvest 90% of Bonk.fun revenue into BONK. Although BNKK nominally still operates a beverage business to maintain its listing status, its core strategy is to provide traditional investors with a stock-like exposure to BONK. This initiative caused significant volatility—on the day of the announcement, the stock price dropped nearly 50%, but prior to the listing of the Bonk ETF, it provided BONK with a public equity market investment channel and drove indiscriminate buying in the market for BONK until the completion of the $115M acquisition commitment.

The demand-side story of BONK is financialization: an initially grassroots meme coin that has now entered the traditional financial system through investment trusts, potential ETFs, publicly listed companies, and derivative markets. If these products succeed, they could inject a large amount of capital into BONK, but they also bring new risks, such as capital flow, premium and discount, and regulatory approval, making the originally purely retail-driven market more complex.

Token Economics: Supply and Demand Accounting

The total supply of BONK has been reduced from the initial 1 trillion to about 880 billion, mainly due to various burn mechanisms.

Among this 88 trillion, there are already multiple non-circulating sources:

· Bonk Rewards Lockup

· BonkDAO Holdings

· Osprey Bonk Trust and Safety Shot Holdings

These account for more than 14% of the remaining total supply, effectively removed from the market.

In addition, there are still about 20 trillion tokens from the original Bonk Contributors allocation that are pending to be unlocked, which is expected to be fully unlocked in the coming months.

We can also demonstrate their impact on supply by projecting the revenue run rates of BonkBot and Bonk.fun onto the token supply reduction. Based on the previously calculated 30-day annualized revenue, BonkBot and Bonk.fun are expected to burn approximately 84 billion and 370 billion BONK per year, respectively, totaling about 0.5% of the total supply.

Essentially, the story of Bonk revolves around limited supply and continuous destruction. Positive catalysts include:

· New locking tool to further reduce circulating supply

· BONK related application revenue increases, driving the burn to accelerate again.

On the contrary, if the Bonk ETF goes live and the Osprey Bonk Trust starts offering a redemption mechanism, or if the market share of applications such as BonkBot and Bonk.fun further declines, we expect the price of BONK to face downward pressure.

Risk factors

The value of BONK is increasingly tied to the performance of applications like BonkBot and Bonk.fun, as they directly affect the burn amount. Whether the Bonk team and community can continue to seize new narratives, launch applications that generate transaction fees and promote burns, and maintain relevance in the crypto market has become a key driving factor for success.

This model is highly cyclical: it is very constructive when product popularity rises, but it similarly experiences a reflexive decline when the popularity wanes. We have observed this phenomenon on BonkBot and Bonk.fun - BONK surged when it dominated these applications, but also faced a decline after its market share was reclaimed by competitors.

The Meme coin ecosystem of Solana is not monopolized. If a more topical Meme coin emerges (like TRUMP earlier this year), users may shift from BONK to other tokens. Similarly, Bonk products face competitive pressure within the Solana ecosystem:

· In 2024, BonkBot was the leader in the trading bot market, but was later marginalized.

· Bonk.fun briefly captured the majority of the Solana Launchpad market share in July 2025, but Pump.fun quickly regained dominance.

If Bonk products continue to lose market share, the narrative of pushing transaction fees into destruction will fail. Bonk must maintain cultural relevance while adapting to the increasingly competitive DeFi and trading application ecosystem on Solana.

Bonk is inherently associated with speculative frenzy. If a major scam or exit event occurs under the Bonk brand, it could affect the entire ecosystem. For example:

· If the malicious tokens issued on Bonk.fun run away, users may blame the platform or Bonk.

· If the price of BONK plummets after being promoted by influencers, the media may label it as “pump and dump”.

The team aims to position Bonk as community-friendly, but there are also negative cases in the history of meme coins, such as lawsuits triggered by celebrity tokens and criticisms from Crypto Twitter regarding “star coins.” Moreover, after Safety Shot announced the BONK treasury strategy, the stock price plummeted nearly 50%, which may indicate that the market views this move as “not serious.” If this narrative spreads (with the media mocking the Bonk treasury as ridiculous), it could hinder further adoption, such as Bonk ETF products, and even provoke regulatory scrutiny of meme coin treasuries.

Conclusion

BONK has evolved from a holiday airdrop into one of the most influential native assets on Solana, embodying community power, experimental spirit, and wide integration. Its fee-driven burn + cultural stickiness model grants it a longer lifespan than most Meme coins, while the acceptance of traditional financial tools marks a new chapter of legitimacy.

However, the future of BONK depends on whether the community can continue to innovate, defend its cultural moat, and maintain an effective burn mechanism amidst competition and changes in narrative. If successful, BONK will become a typical case of how Meme coins transform into lasting ecological assets.