--- title: "BonkDAO (BONK)" url: "https://caper.network/wiki/daos/social/bonkdao" updated: 2026-09-11 license: CC-BY-4.0 license_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" --- # BonkDAO (BONK) | | | | --- | --- | | **Name** | BonkDAO – the token-holder governance body of [BONK](https://www.bonkcoin.com/), the Solana community memecoin | | **Type** | Community / cultural DAO governing a memecoin treasury and its ecosystem spending (Solana) | | **Token** | BONK (SPL, mint `DezXAZ8z…B1pPB263`, 5 decimals) – launched 25 December 2022 with 100 trillion tokens; on-chain supply **87,994,588,756,876.71** BONK read from the mint on 14 August 2026, ~$255m market cap ([CoinGecko](https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/bonk), 2 August 2026) | | **Distribution** | No private sale and no venture round – half the supply airdropped to Solana users, artists, developers and NFT communities at launch | | **Governance** | Bonk Improvement Proposals (BIPs) voted token-weighted on [Realms](https://app.realms.today/dao/84pGFuy1Y27ApK67ApethaPvexeDWA66zNV8gm38TVeQ), the front end for Solana's [SPL Governance](/wiki/dao-governance/tooling/frameworks/spl-governance) program. Approval threshold `YesVotePercentage(1)` – 1% of full token supply in _Yes_ weight, with **no participation floor of any kind**; 5-day voting window plus a 1-day cool-off; **execution hold-up 0 seconds** | | **On-chain** | Realm `84pGFuy1Y27ApK67ApethaPvexeDWA66zNV8gm38TVeQ`, community governance `Uq5BRkVfdBpMknZJHw6huS3dunEgJpUDv3M2DG3BfQg`, program `GovER5Lthms3bLBqWub97yVrMmEogzX7xNjdXpPPCVZw` – every figure on this page is readable from these accounts | | **Notable event** | [BIP #76, June–July 2026](https://app.realms.today/dao/84pGFuy1Y27ApK67ApethaPvexeDWA66zNV8gm38TVeQ/proposal/6wR1jdhhJ31bbdRNXva8MxqsgsNLKTxargcdAyZ7FcRj) – one wallet bought just over 1% of supply and voted ~$20m out of the treasury, on a ballot seven of the realm's 18,476 registered token-owner records took part in | | **Related** | [Governance attacks](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/analysis/dao-security-and-governance-attacks), [Voter apathy](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/analysis/voter-apathy), [Token-weighted voting](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/voting/token-weighted-voting), [ApeCoin DAO](/wiki/daos/social/apecoin-dao), [Nouns DAO](/wiki/daos/social/nouns-dao) | **BonkDAO** is the governance body that spends the treasury of [BONK](https://www.bonkcoin.com/), the community memecoin launched on Solana on Christmas Day 2022. It is worth a directory entry for a reason that has nothing to do with memes: in July 2026 BonkDAO became the clearest worked example of a treasury whose _market price_ was published in its own governance settings. A proposal passed when _Yes_ votes reached 1% of token supply, and nothing at all was required of the other 99% – so anyone willing to buy 1% of BONK could pass a proposal alone. On 6 July 2026 someone did exactly that and moved roughly **$20 million** out of the treasury ([CoinDesk](https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2026/07/07/bonk-faces-usd20-million-treasury-drain-after-attacker-spends-usd4-million-to-pass-malicious-proposal)). No contract was broken. The vote was valid, and the whole of it is still on-chain. ## An airdrop that became an ecosystem BONK launched on **25 December 2022** with an initial supply of **100 trillion** tokens and no private sale, no venture allocation, and no team round. Half of that supply was airdropped across the Solana community – traders, NFT collectors, artists, developers and contributors – during a period when Solana activity had collapsed in the wake of the FTX failure, which is most of why the token attached itself to the chain's identity so quickly ([bonkcoin.com](https://www.bonkcoin.com/)). A share of the launch supply was set aside as a DAO-controlled treasury; that treasury is the thing BonkDAO votes on. What grew on top of it is unusual for a memecoin. BONK is now the settlement token for a cluster of consumer products – a swap venue, spot and perpetual trading, a Telegram trading bot, and the [LetsBonk](https://letsbonk.fun/) token launchpad – several of which route a slice of fees into buybacks and burns. Supply has fallen from 100 trillion at launch to **87,994,588,756,876.71** BONK, read directly from the mint account on 14 August 2026, with a market capitalisation near **$255 million** ([CoinGecko](https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/bonk), 2 August 2026). Developer documentation for the ecosystem sits at [build.bonkcoin.com](https://build.bonkcoin.com/). The gap between that product surface and the DAO's governance surface is the story. BONK acquired an ecosystem, a burn mechanism and **18,476** registered token-owner records on its realm; its DAO kept the governance configuration of a 2022 community project. ## How BonkDAO governs Proposals are filed as **Bonk Improvement Proposals** and voted token-weighted on [Realms](https://app.realms.today/dao/84pGFuy1Y27ApK67ApethaPvexeDWA66zNV8gm38TVeQ), the standard Solana governance front end built on the [SPL Governance](/wiki/dao-governance/tooling/frameworks/spl-governance) program. Realms is a capable framework – it supports councils, multiple vote thresholds, and configurable execution delays – but those protections are _per-realm settings_, not defaults, and BonkDAO's realm was configured without them. The settings below are not reported figures: they are the fields of the community governance account `Uq5BRkVfdBpMknZJHw6huS3dunEgJpUDv3M2DG3BfQg`, readable by anyone against a Solana RPC node. - **Approval threshold: `YesVotePercentage(1)`.** This is the detail most accounts of the attack get slightly wrong by calling it a quorum. A quorum is a floor on _participation_; this is a floor on _Yes weight alone_, measured against the full token supply. No votes do not raise it, abstentions do not raise it, and a turnout of one wallet satisfies it as readily as a turnout of ten thousand. At the supply recorded on the proposal itself, the line stood at **879,947,133,976.03 BONK**. - **Voting window: 432,000 seconds base plus an 86,400-second cool-off** – five days of open voting and a sixth day in which positions can only be softened or withdrawn. The proposal is public for the whole six days. Visibility only helps if someone is watching. - **Execution hold-up: `min_transaction_hold_up_time = 0`.** There is no timelock. A passed instruction becomes executable the instant the tally closes, so there is no window in which a community could cancel a transfer it had just noticed ([Halborn](https://www.halborn.com/blog/post/explained-the-bonkdao-hack-july-2026)). - **Cost of filing: 100,000,000 BONK** (`min_community_weight_to_create_proposal`) – a few hundred dollars at the July 2026 price. The expensive part of the attack was never the ticket to file. None of these are Realms defects. They are the choices a DAO makes when its governance is set up in a week and never revisited as the treasury grows – the general failure pattern catalogued under [How DAOs fail](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/analysis/how-daos-fail). The part that generalises past this one DAO – a pass line denominated in tokens, guarding a treasury denominated in dollars, with an exchange rate between them that moves without any vote – is treated in general on [Quorum and threshold design](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/voting/quorum-and-threshold-design). ## BIP #76: the treasury bought for a fifth of its value On **30 June 2026 at 08:25:24 UTC** an anonymous wallet filed **BIP #76 – "Sowellian BonkDAO"**, presented as a governance-renewal plan that would install new members and a council and "rebuild from the ashes". Its own description, stored on-chain, names the operative instruction in plain text: _"Send 4.426.104.450.305 Bonk to 9bxWkNf3BtJ6iehq9KbX9uCWMjem4TFiPZ19T2sYJHvQ"_, and it offers the reader a motive to vote for it – _"all YES voters are eligible to receive tokens"_. Sign-off followed **15 seconds** after drafting and voting opened immediately. Over 4–5 July the same actor bought just over 1% of BONK supply on Bybit and Binance, part-funded by borrowing against DeFi collateral, for roughly **$4.4 million** – an amount sized to clear the pass line and little more. Voting closed on **6 July 2026 at 08:25:39 UTC**, six days to the second. The [proposal account](https://app.realms.today/dao/84pGFuy1Y27ApK67ApethaPvexeDWA66zNV8gm38TVeQ/proposal/6wR1jdhhJ31bbdRNXva8MxqsgsNLKTxargcdAyZ7FcRj) records the whole tally, and seven vote records exist against it – seven wallets out of 18,476 registered token-owner records, or **0.038%** of them: - **Yes: 882,383,387,283.79 BONK**, or 1.0028% of the 87,994,713,397,603.04 BONK supply the proposal snapshotted – over the 879,947,133,976.03 line by **0.28%**. - **No: 710,848,288.77 BONK** across four wallets. Four holders read the proposal, understood it, and voted against it; their combined weight was **0.08%** of the Yes side, which under an approval threshold makes no difference whatsoever. - **One wallet**, `CyEE7oHVDaFJ5xZLbXY3h2Z2uk1VwhTkdy72kPUEtypQ`, cast **882,285,249,588.80 BONK** – **99.91%** of all weight cast, and on its own 0.27% above the pass line. The two other Yes votes, 97.9 million and 0.25 million BONK, were not needed. Total weight cast came to 883,094,235,572.57 BONK: **1.004% of the token supply decided the vote**. Execution began **38 seconds** after the tally closed, at 08:26:17 UTC, and the proposal was closed out 11 seconds later – four transactions, all four executed. The buyer then relinquished their vote record, releasing the deposited tokens. BonkDAO [confirmed the loss publicly](https://news.bitcoin.com/bonkdao-treasury-loses-20m-in-malicious-governance-attack-bonk-slides-8/), said it had identified the exchange wallets used to accumulate the stake, and began working with exchanges, bridges, the Solana Foundation and law enforcement; at least one exchange suspended BONK transfers while the funds moved ([CryptoSlate](https://cryptoslate.com/bonkdaos-estimated-20m-drain-exposes-a-serious-security-fault-line-for-memecoin-treasuries/)). The full technical account – the attack families it belongs to, the defences it defeated, and how it compares with Beanstalk, Steem and Compound Prop 289 – is in [DAO security and governance attacks](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/analysis/dao-security-and-governance-attacks). The participation side of it is treated in [Voter apathy and governance participation](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/analysis/voter-apathy). ## The same proposal had already been defeated once The on-chain record holds a detail no account of the attack has reported, and it changes the moral of the story. BIP #76 was not a novel idea that caught a sleeping DAO by surprise. Its shape had been tried seven months earlier and rejected. On **22 November 2025** a proposal titled **"The Orange Project"** (`DZpjvxst93zDWUSPVhVBQdQCxpcXLtTzVtZmr1EqcwPe`) was filed against the same governance, carrying two transactions and the same inducement in its description – _"Active supporters of this proposal will be recognized and rewarded."_ It was **defeated**: 30,212,382,299 BONK in favour against **77,334,737,047 BONK opposed**, reaching only 3.4% of the pass line. Twenty-two wallets voted, one of them casting a pointed 69,420,000,000 BONK against. So the DAO that lost $20 million in July 2026 had mustered **three times as many voters** to kill a similar proposal in November 2025 – and, between BIP #75 on 7 February 2025 and BIP #76 almost seventeen months later, passed nothing at all. The exposure was never that BonkDAO's members could not recognise a treasury grab. It was that a threshold measured only in _Yes_ weight lets an attacker choose an electorate of one, and that nothing in the configuration required the twenty-two who had shown up before to show up again. ## What it changed, and what it didn't The reform list circulating around BonkDAO and the wider Solana ecosystem is the expected one: mandatory execution timelocks on treasury instructions, a pass line scaled to the value at risk rather than to a fixed share of supply, multisig or council sign-off on large transfers, and anomaly review before execution ([crypto.news](https://crypto.news/the-bonk-governance-attack-how-a-dao-lost-20-million-in-one-proposal/)). These remain proposals rather than shipped configuration: read on 14 August 2026, the community governance account still carries `YesVotePercentage(1)` and a hold-up time of zero. Recovery of the drained tokens is unresolved. The transferable lesson is narrower than "memecoin DAOs are unserious". BonkDAO's 1% was a number chosen when the treasury was worth little and the token was a joke; it was never re-priced as the treasury grew into eight figures. Any DAO whose pass line is denominated in _tokens_ while its treasury is denominated in _dollars_ has the same exposure, and the exchange rate between the two moves without anyone voting on it. The general treatment of that problem sits under [DAO treasury management](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/treasury/dao-treasury-management); the mechanics of the vote itself under [Token-weighted voting](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/voting/token-weighted-voting) and [Proposal lifecycle](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/voting/proposal-lifecycle). ## How Caper approaches this Caper does not solve governance capture, but it prices it differently, and it does not settle the question at the ballot. Voting weight on a [caper](/wiki/foundations/what-is-a-caper) is not a function of tokens held: each ballot is credited `(t·v)/(V·T)` – the voter's token balance `t` multiplied by their soulbound vote tokens `v`, over the vote-token supply `V` times the circulating supply `T`, with `T` frozen when the proposal is raised. `v` accrues on one surface only: one per ballot cast, with buying, selling and transfers minting none (`VOTE_MINT`, `contracts/logic/src/lib.rs`). So capital moves only one factor of the product – a buyer who takes the whole float still has `v = 0`, and therefore zero weight, until they start casting ballots at one per proposal per account. That is not a defence, it is a different bill: the attacker has to keep showing up as a member rather than pay once. It is not the flat one-token-one-vote line BonkDAO's attacker paid roughly $4M to cross. The second phase is the one BonkDAO had no analogue for. A ballot that carries is only legislation. A proposal offers two to five ranked options, always including a “do nothing”; the leading option passes only if it takes `1.5 / option_count` of the weight _actually cast_ – a tally with no weight behind it fails outright – and is not the “do nothing”. That earns the right to trigger, nothing more. Triggering locks the caper's trailing average token price as a baseline and opens the market window, and the action executes only if the token's time-weighted average price across that window is at or above the baseline. An attacker who buys a majority and passes a drain then has to hold the price up for the whole market window against everyone selling into it. See [Voting](/wiki/governance/voting) and [Proposals](/wiki/governance/proposals); the redemption path, which pays out at that same weight, in [leaving a caper](/wiki/foundations/leaving-a-caper).