In the past seven days, the price of BONK has jumped 20% to reach a market cap of $1.73 billion, while WIF has seen its price slump 11.2%, shrinking its market cap to $1.63 billion in the same time period, data from CoinGecko shows. Despite having comparable market caps, BONK has 741,352 holders compared to WIF’s 163,683, blockchain explorer Solscan shows.
BONK overtaking WIF by market cap comes as BONK DAO, which manages a treasury valued at nearly $299 million, is currently voting to burn almost $2.2 million worth of BONK. According to the ongoing vote that started two days ago, “BONK DAO is proposing to a BURN of 83,917,950,070 BONK from its Treasury representing 100% of the BONK earned by BONK DAO from its revenue sharing agreement with BONKBot in Q2.” If passed, the proposal will trigger instructions to initiate the burn.
BONKBot is a Solana-based trading bot application within popular messaging platform Telegram that allows users to trade various cryptocurrencies such as memecoins on their mobile devices. A Dune Analytics dashboard created by onchain data analyst @Whale_Hunter, BONKBot has generated over $7 billion in trading volume and attracted about 384,000 users in its lifetime.
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One wallet address that placed its vote in favor of the proposal within the last hour wrote, “Burning 84 billion tokens will skyrocket the value of the remaining token[s], driving demand, and benefiting all holders.”
Timeline of the Dog-Inspired Memecoins
With a combined market cap of nearly $3.4 billion, BONK and WIF make up roughly 7.6% of the entire market cap of all memecoins.
BONK debuted in Dec. 2022 shortly after the collapse of centralized exchange FTX, whose founder Sam Bankman-Fried had close connections with Solana. The token was launched to specifically address how “Solana has been the victim of predatory VC tokens that prey on the wider Solana community,” BONK’s whitepaper states.
Since its rollout, BONK has played a pivotal role in improving community sentiment around Solana, and by Dec. 2023, BONK had helped Solana’s Saga mobile phones sell out in the US, in part, because each device had a BONK allocation, which at the time was worth more than the price of the phone itself.
BONK’s market cap exceeded $191 million at the time of WIF’s launch in Nov. 2023, about one year after BONK started trading. By March 11, 2024, WIF had a market cap of $2.09 billion exceeding BONK’s $2.02 billion, helping WIF claim the belt for most valuable memecoin on Solana. WIF has had that lead until Wednesday.
The market cap of all memecoins is over $44.79 billion, roughly 2% of crypto’s total market cap of $2.2 trillion, per CoinGecko.