The decentralized autonomous organization BonkDAO, behind the memecoin Bonk (BONK), reported that unknown individuals withdrew tokens worth $20 million from its treasury. The project called this an attack through a malicious governance proposal.
On Monday, the Bonk team wrote on X that they had already contacted law enforcement after the attack and are now trying to recover the funds and identify those involved. According to BonkDAO, the attackers withdrew tokens from the project’s treasury on the Solana network.
BONK was launched in December 2022. It is one of the dog-themed memecoins, along with Dogecoin (DOGE) and Shiba Inu (SHIB). At launch, the developers distributed half of the total token supply through an airdrop.
Following reports of the attack, the price of BONK fell by about 7% in a day, to $0.05.
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The memecoin market as a whole is also going through a rough patch. Last week, the capitalization of the largest tokens, including DOGE, SHIB and Pepe (PEPE), dropped to a two-year low — about $22 billion. The figure later recovered above $26 billion, but according to CoinMarketCap, at the time of publication the total sector capitalization was $25.3 billion. Over the past 12 months, it has fallen by more than 54%.
In May, a similar incident occurred with the memecoin launch platform DxSale. The project lost $7.3 million in tokens after a cyberattack that affected liquidity providers on the BNB Chain. Although on-chain analysts managed to find the attacker’s wallet, one expert noted that the infrastructure used to move the funds could make further tracking much more difficult.
Trump Memecoin Investors Lose Money While President Earns Billions on Crypto
According to The New York Times, as of June 30, about a million investors in the Official Trump (TRUMP) memecoin collectively lost $3.8 billion. The publication cites data from the analytics company Nansen.
This information appeared just a few days after President US Donald Trump disclosed income from his crypto projects. According to the declaration, they brought him more than $1.4 billion, of which about $635 million came from projects related to memecoins.
