This is not going be another article about $BONK going bonkers. We will totally not use the lame “bonkers” word play. We bet you won’t even remember the term — “bonkers”, by the time you are done reading this. There is no way we will mention how BONK’s bonker marketing strategy made Solana’s NFT ecosystem pump like a Black Eyed Peas jam.
Wait, did we mention this article is about the meme token BONK on the Solana blockchain?
TL;DR, BONK totally didn’t go bonkers. However, it did make the crypto community go gaga by activating NFT degens and DeFi traders during the best of the time aka the holly jolly Christmas.
Historically hysterical; story of SOL
First things first, why tf are we even talking about Solana? What’s so special about the rise of SOL ecosystem?
Well because 2022 was a pretty terrible year for the Solana community.
Remember our crypto poster boy, SBF’s FTX fiasco?
So yeah, that dude held a bunch of SOL and after the curtain reveal of our Mr.oh-so-nice’s nuisance, SOL didn’t feel too nice.
In the last week of December 2022, Solana price plummeted 97% to $8 from its November 2021 peak of $23.
Poor SOL (quite literally) joined the ranks of the worst-performing tokens of 2022, including FTX Token and LUNA, which are down around 98%.
But it wasn’t all SBF…
Solana even picked up a feud with Polygon. However, we totally appreciated SOL’s guts.
Its like a junior in school (L1s in crypto), picking fights with a senior jock (L2 on Ethereum). Impressive much?
It started when Mert Mumtaz, co-founder and CEO of Helius (a Solana infrastructure application) took to Twitter to point fingers at Polygon.
This dude totally accused our man, Sandeep — Polygon co-founder of paying developers to build on his network (we are neither denying, nor agreeing if this is true or if this IS TRUE!)
So then Sandeep went full beast mode on Solana, and said some stuff we totally didn’t “you know what he said?” about later.
The Polygon co-founder highlighted Solana’s downtime issues along with saying nobody likes Solana because it aint no Ethereum. That’s as bad as, “you’re too ugly to be the prom queen.” Hey, have you SEEN US without our glasses? (read that again, but as Chandler Bing this time)
Anyway, following this Twitter drama even the dark horse of NFTs moved from Solana to Polygon. The NFT project, DeGods and Y00ts, also announced that DeGods would be bridging to Ethereum, and Y00ts would then bridge to the Polygon.
So, bottom line, Solana was soo done with this shit.
Solana: “Bonk me back to life”
Amid all this mess, Solana decided to give it one last shot and guess what, it hit the bull’s eye!
The network saw the launch of $BONK — first Solana dog coin.
Bonk was launched with the objective to solve this L1’s layered issues (pun intended).
It started with the long standing issue of low float but high FDV trap.
Which DVD?!
“Low flo” refers to a token with a relatively small circulating supply of tokens, and “high FDV” (or “High Market Capitalization”) denotes a cryptocurrency that has a large total value. These terms are often used to describe different types of cryptocurrencies and their potential for investment.
A low flo cryptocurrency might be considered more risky but also more likely to experience significant price appreciation, while a high FDV token is considered more stable but may have less potential for large gains.
However, scammer used to combine the two contrasting properties and that resulted in:
- an insignificant percentage of the total supply actually being traded.
- majority tokens in the circulating supply were controlled by a small group of insiders and not on the market.
Lamently, what happened because of this was — scammers began to use this scheme to offload tokens onto unsuspecting retail investors. Furthermore, it was also used as collateral on lending and borrowing protocols instead of being an actual investment.
Just like every rebel story, Bonk went full counter-culture and said “our distribution won’t suck” and we were like “wtf?!”
They airdropped 50% of total supply to the producers along with the consumers. Basically all active artists, traders, developers — everyone got a piece of this airdrop.
What did this do?
Well, it helped with better distribution. To act like we know our shit let’s insert some jargon and data here:
So according to live on-chain data from birdeye, the top 10 BONK holders control only 38.62% of the circulation supply, compared to the 70-90% range other comparable tokens have.
What does that do? Nation of decentralisation! i.e. – it is much harder for a small group of insiders to manipulate the BONK price compared to any of the other tokens – because supply concentration is much lower and significantly higher percentage of the total supply has been unlocked.
Additionally, this airdrop happened during a dead air window. They airdropped to these degens during Christmas when nobody was doing much. This activated an organic social campaign where the big guns started to talk more about Bonk, and the token along with Solana got isolated limelight during the holiday season.
Hop, skin, and bounce, with nothing but an ounce of simple marketing, Solana NFTs were back on the charts.
The network began to see a lot more activity, including more people began to mint on Solana. Degens on Twitter even started giving away BONK tokens to gain followers and engagement on their accounts. And that’s how we knew, Solana was back in game, even if they used a pump-and-dump meme coin for it.
Moral of the story: Us web3 folks are all animal lovers. Be it dogs, cats, horses or penguins, we have pet ‘em all. You put a cute pup on the face of any chain, and we will pull our wallets out like those 20-something women at zara sales.
