Free money is hard to come by.
In fact, analysts are heralding an end to free money, foreshadowed by the three horsemen of rising interest rates, inflation and quantitative tightening.
That is probably a necessary, if not necessarily enjoyable, development, but while the central banks are rushing to tighten their purse strings, one cryptocurrency project has come along like a belated Santa Claus, distributing free Solana-based crypto tokens to unsuspecting good boys and girls.
Rather than a jolly big beard and rotund physique, this Santa has a cute nose, pointy ears and a shaggy orange coat.
He goes by the name Bonk, and he comes on a platform of being “the first Solana dog coin for the people, by the people with 50% of the total supply airdropped to the Solana community”.
If you’re still scratching your head, let me break it down: Bonk is a new Shiba Inu-themed meme coin in the style of Dogecoin or Shiba Inu, airdropped randomly to Solana blockchain users.
Its origins are unclear, and it doesn’t seem to have any utility beyond the memes, but Bonk has managed to pique the interest of the crypto community, and has soared over 2,000% since trading began on 30 December 2022.
Digging into the data
Each BONK token goes for a princely sum of $0.000002547 (as of 4 January), but a total supply of 10 trillion tokens means a BONK’s market capitalisation of over US$100mln.
The BONK airdrop delivered 50% of the supply to a randomly selected group of Solana NFT collectors, developers and artists. Exactly how the airdrop was curated beyond that is unknown.
Fifteen percent was allocated to early openbook traders and the remainder was allocated to various stakeholders, including marketing and development.
Bearing in mind the lack of substantial transparency, this information is all contingent on the scant website’s details being accurate.
Who is Bonk?
As is typical with meme projects, the Bonk team is undoxxed and anonymous. What is less typical is having no Discord server or Telegram channel.
Save for a well-maintained Twitter page, the Bonk team has a very slim digital footprint, although Proactive left messsages on the website’s chat function in a vain attempt to extract some information.
In lieu of cold, hard facts, where else to turn to than Crypto Twitter to indulge in uncorroborated rumours.
Leading conspiracy theories include Sam Bankman-Fried being the founder, or Solana itself.
The latter has a bit of weight behind it; Solana (SOL), which was utterly battered in 2022, has skyrocketed in the past few days, and is now almost 40% up week on week.
How convenient for the hottest new meme coin to swoop in and drag SOL’s price out of the trenches.
Bonk: The bottom line
Why has a meme coin, with little to no utility, an anonymous team, and not even a Tweet of support from Elon Musk, gained so much interest?
Perhaps that’s the point.
2022 has shown us that no matter how fancy you make your crypto project sound, there is a 99% chance that it will bleed out.
Perhaps the market craves the opposite; a return to the basics, where stuffy blockchain protocols are replaced by communities in it to get rich quick at the expense of latecomers.
Will 2023 be the year of the s**tcoin revolution?
If so, we could be braced for the next groundswell of ‘the next big tokens’, each stupider than the next, each ultimately being a honey trap for exit liquidity.
But hey, if you bought at the 30 December low, you’d be 2,000% up right now!