My Bonk Story: A history of Bonk
This was orginally produced as an X thread for a Superteam bounty https://x.com/defi1crypto2/status/1761910349396389977?s=20
My Bonk Journey
I love Bonk. In many ways it was my journey into crypto proper.
I first got into crypto on-chain in Dec/Jan 2023. I, like many people, had been dabbling in crypto via CEXs (centralised exchanges) during the boom and had taken a large hit to my portfolio due to the crash in 2022. I’d been lucky enough to liquidate all my assets before the market really bottomed out but largely that was because after the FTX collapse rather than good management. I was fearful of contagion and had finally made the jump to self custody.
It didn’t take many $10 transaction fees on Ethereum before I went looking for a better option. Solana was it and so I stumbled onto Bonk. It was first via the insane APYs on Kamino and that led me to the project and journey of learning that I’ll be forever grateful for.
This is a history of Bonk from my perspective. You’ll likely have your own that differs a little or a lot. This is mine though and it’s driven by my own (strong) opinions on this space.
Hope you enjoy!
The Stuff Everyone Probably Knows
Let’s recap the parts of this story that everyone mostly knows by now. These parts have been reported widely and much better than I could do justice to. Here’s a brief summary.
How it started
BONK was first launched on December 25, 2022 on the Solana blockchain.
https://decrypt.co/118295/solana-surges-doge-themed-shib-rival-bonk
https://decrypt.co/119286/solana-sol-price-rising-bonk-helium
The main goal of the team (initially) was to bring back liquidity to Solana-based decentralized exchanges (DEXs) which had been crushed by the FTX implosion a couple of months earlier.
https://decrypt.co/118150/solana-slides-another-16-and-falls-out-of-top-20
How it’s going
Whilst BONK is down from it’s ATHs in December 2023, it remains a large project in the ecosystem and in crypto in general
https://decrypt.co/209850/solanas-bonk-69th-largest-coin-market-cap-tops-1-billion
And for those that doubted its legitimacy at the time (and to be fair MOST memecoins are still scams of some sort) it’s been a remarkable story of continued delivery and community growth.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/akepm5/the-absurd-rise-of-dollarbonk-shows-that-nobody-learned-anything-in-the-crypto-crash 
Not your typical memecoin
Bonk is not your typical memecoin project as we’ve come to know them.
An important comparison to make is with Pepe, a similarly resilient memecoin in terms of longevity and liquidity.
PEPE was first launched in mid-April 2023, the first entry point on Etherscan was on April 18, 2023. This was in the midst of the bear market, and it drove increased market volumes, and ETH gas fees, at a time when little was doing either.
https://decrypt.co/137509/uniswap-trades-soar-pepe-mania-meme-coin
https://decrypt.co/resources/what-is-pepecoin-pepe
https://www.dlnews.com/articles/markets/memecoin-pepe-trading-burns-ether-bullish-case-for-ethereum/
It’s easy to look at both tokens and assume they are very similar.
PEPE is the largest memecoin on Ethereum.
BONK is the largest memecoin on Solana.
Lesson over, let’s move on.
But it’s when we look a little deeper we start to see a divergence right at the start.
PEPE, launched in mid April 2023, was listed on Binance on May 5, 2023 and on Coinbase on May 18, 2023.
BONK, launched on Xmas Day Dec 2022, was listed on Coinbase on December 14, 2023 and Binance on December 15, 2023.
Those are two very different journeys and that’s because these are two very different projects.
As of time of writing there are the stats from https://bonkcoin.com/
- 619K+ wallets
- 118 integrations
- 10 chains
That integrations number is the most important. Sufficient incentive schemes will drive wallet numbers (though 610K is a big number for anyone in crypto) but integrations take a lot of time and effort. 
Builders wanna build
Bonk started as it meant to go on: Building. Whilst memecoins almost exclusively focus on driving trading volumes and that normally entails getting exchange listings (this was key to PEPE’s success), Bonk was focused on building primarily in the Solana ecosystem.
(what follows is in rough, but not strict, chronological order)
Defi love
The first thing Bonk did was establish a significant presence in Solana defi. It’s a trend that continues today unabated. I cannot think of a defi protocol in Solana that hasn’t had BONK incentives thrown at it at one stage, and most have had multiple rounds of incentives. The Bonk team were very generous in their initial token distribution and continued that into their focus on building a strong liquidity base on Solana defi. It’s not that BONK hasn’t been listed on CEXs, it has, it’s just at a time (early 2023) when the vast amount of crypto was traded on CEXs and defi volumes were tiny by comparison, Bonk focused on building defi first and foremost. It’s that long term view and laser focus that drove my interest. I discovered Kamino and much of Solana defi through following BONK around.
I first found MarginFi (before the points!) by staking BONK in the (now deprecated) Earn vault.
Relentlessly promote new tech
Another focus that emerged quickly from the Bonk team was that of showcasing tech on Solana.
Soon after BONK launched we saw BonkOrBust. Which was the first time we got to see Bonk be a showcase for new tech. It would not be the last time we saw Bonk lead the adoption of technological innovations on Solana. 
A bit after BonkOrBust we saw BonkSwap launch. Which integrated HXRO Network tech as well.
Later that year, November, they would go on to add the escrow staking module from HXRO, in the form of esBONK, to BonkSwap https://medium.com/@bonk_inu/esbonk-upgrade-1e7cbbb617eb 
I first learned of HXRO Network and started following them through their Bonk integrations.
I started following Blocmates because of their deep dive on Bonk and HXRO back at this time https://www.blocmates.com/protocol-focus/defi-flywheels-the-unexpected-hxro-amp-bonk-printer
Establishing liquidity pathways back to Solana
The Wormhole integration was a lot more significant at the time than it seems now. Solana wasn’t out of the woods by any means in mid 2023. On-chain volumes were still pitiful. Putting the time and effort into building the cross chain pipelines were vital in helping act as a magnet to pull more liquidity into Solana. Memecoins are great onboarding tools. They’re so cheap that many people don’t think too much about playing around with a few thousand (or million) tokens on a new chain or even as their first foray into self custody. 
Supporting the chain
Bonk continued their focus on core infrastructure by releasing their own validator, powered by the relatively new Solana entrant at the time, Jito Network. At the time, August 2023, this was an innovative approach from a project to run their own validator as a part of building their community. Since this we’ve seen other projects spin up their own validators for similar reasons. 
Bonk has continued to this day to lend their support to the base infrastructure on which it sits, recently announcing the release of bonkSOL on Sanctum, which will help drive greater LST take up in Solana (something the ecosystem really needs to see happen). 
Bonk LOVES games
Ever since Bonk first launched it’s always had a strong presence in web3 gaming. There’s a heap of games which have benefited from BONK integrations and/or incentives. Whilst there are too many to list, an integration with Evio stands out for the design. This caught the eye of many in the crypto and gaming spaces for its innovative take on how to integrate token rewards into a game.
https://decrypt.co/143100/solana-shooter-evio-giving-out-billions-bonk-tokens-in-game
Whilst Evio may not have reached Axie heights in terms of sheer popularity, this kind of innovative thinking was yet another example of the Bonk ethos of pushing for people to break new ground in order to bring
more people on chain and onto Solana.
Supporting builders
A important milestone was achieved with the launch of the Align Protocol site for Bonk https://bonk.phaselabs.io/. Whilst this is one of the lower key developments from the team in terms of sheer ecosystem excitement, this is one of the most significant developments for Bonk as it created a set process for teams and individuals to submit proposals for funding to the Bonk community and have them voted on. An ecosystem is only ever as strong as its parts and to have a strong ecosystem on Solana there needs to be things for people to do. You have to build those things and before that you have to fund them. These are by no means large grants but they are very much in the vein of ‘let a million flowers blossom’. Given how early the Solana ecosystem is, this is exactly the right attitude to have. 
Bonk LOVES artists
Art has always been an important driving force within the Bonk community. Memes are important but Bonk has consistently shown a deep connection with the artist community on Solana.
When Breakpoint 2023 rolled around it kicked off Bonk’s debut on ExchangeArt and as a patron for artists in the ecosystem.
But this was just another in a long line of art projects they’ve been active in supporting, ranging from community projects like Bonkz which have showcased dozens of artists via their BONKz 1/1 initiative. 
To directly supporting events 
Bonk Galleries on ExchangeArt is a growing collection of great Bonk themed art. Recent additions have included initiatives like Bonkmas and My Bonk Valentine.
With nearly 600K in total volume so far this is serious and growing artist patronage endeavour.
https://exchange.art/bonk-galleries/nfts
At this point I want to shamelessly plug the SuperBonk collection from @GooseDuck. I hold a few of these and even have one on a t-shirt from back when the artist dropped some discount codes in the Bonk Discord mid 2023.
Really would like to see a few more of these make it to t-shirts (hint hint if you’re reading this @GooseDuck!) 
The Solana art community LOVE Bonk
There’s a lot of love for Bonk on DRiP as well. Many artists have dropped Bonk themed pieces. To my knowledge none have been directly commissioned or incentivised by the Bonk team.
Artists only get a few pieces each drop and there’s a limited number of slots available for artists on DRiP. That they are dedicating pieces to Bonk art shows it’s more than simple engagement farming. Bonk is becoming an integral piece of Solana culture. 
Continuing to showcase new tech
Early August 2023 Bonk launched SVB (Silicon Valley Bonk). It was another important showcase of tech on Solana. In this case it was soul bound tokens (the keys) and an on-going rewards contract linked to those tokens.
I’ve written on BULB about SVB and why I was (and still am) so excited about what it represented.
https://www.bulbapp.io/p/71ec63d9-5441-4631-8675-b5408dd5cff7/school-of-bonk-lessons-1-2-svb-and-kamino?s_id=c1cf17c2-9c31-41dd-b2ce-165ba8e54c55 
BonkBot is a Telegram trading bot launched by a Bonk team late 2023. It would go on to dominate trading volumes amongst Telegram bots. So much so the Unibot team, the leading Telegram bot at the time, was prompted to deploy a separate Unibot implementation on Solana in order to compete.
https://blockworks.co/news/bonkbot-volumes-rise 
BonkBot have very much followed the overall Bonk blueprint: Push the tech to it’s limits & Bring the community along with you
- there’s now a range of BonkBots you can choose from, each attempting to tackle trade speed from a different angle
- Solana projects can sign up to create their own BonkBot referral schemes to drive revenue back to their DAOs
It was towards the end of 2023 we saw a Bonk community led project launch the very first working implementation of the new token standard from Solana: token2022.
BERN (BonkEarn) https://www.bernboard.com/ was a showcase for the rest of the ecosystem just what these, self styled ‘super tokens’, could unlock in terms of functionality.
Come January 2024 we saw Bonk launch yet another showcase of tech on Solana, this time in the form of BonkRewards which leverage the HXRO Network (yep those guys again) project Armada. 
The formation of BonkDAO at the start of February 2024 was yet another step towards formalising and expanding Bonk’s role in the Solana ecosystem in driving innovation and adoption.
Of course they promptly then went and announced support for a series of hackathons in Solana. Because you can’t help but build when you’re from Bonk. It’s in their digital blood.
https://x.com/bonk_dao/status/1755255525611278793?s=20
https://x.com/bonk_dao/status/1753071272354103488?s=20
Just the beginning
There’s so much more to explore with Bonk. I’ve really only barely touched on what Bonk has done, is doing now, and has planned for the future.
Being part of the ecosystem allows you to be on the cutting edge of Solana tech, crypto products, and the Solana culture. It’s a wonderful place to play and learn. Could not recommend it more highly if you have even a passing interest in crypto as a technology, but most importantly as products people want to use.
If you think you're late to the party: You're not. 
