Bonk (BONK) is a dog-themed meme coin issued on the Solana blockchain. It was launched on 25 December 2022, when half of its supply was given away free to people active on Solana, and it became the first large dog coin native to that network. BONK is used for trading, tipping and payments inside a growing set of Solana apps, and part of its supply is regularly destroyed.
BONK is a token, not a blockchain: it runs on Solana and pays its fees in Solana (SOL). It is often compared with older dog coins such as Dogecoin (DOGE) and Shiba Inu (SHIB), and with the later Solana meme coin dogwifhat (WIF). No company issues it; a loose group of contributors and Solana projects promotes it.
Bonk in plain terms
Imagine a town whose shops have been through a hard winter. Someone prints a huge pile of novelty vouchers with a cartoon dog on them and hands half of them out for free to the people who kept the town going: the shopkeepers, the regulars and the artists. Nobody promised the vouchers would be worth anything, but they were fun, they were free and everyone had some, so people started swapping them and local shops began to accept them.
That is roughly what happened with Bonk. The vouchers were so plentiful that each one was worth a tiny fraction of a cent. Over time, some of them have been thrown into a fire on purpose, which leaves fewer in circulation. Their value still rests almost entirely on how many people want them.
History
Bonk appeared at a low point for Solana. The FTX exchange, one of the network's biggest backers, had collapsed in November 2022, and Solana's coin had fallen sharply. The anonymous creators described BONK as a community coin for Solana and distributed 50 percent of a supply of roughly 100 trillion tokens in an airdrop. Reported recipients included holders of dozens of Solana NFT collections, early traders on the OpenBook exchange, artists and collectors, and Solana developers. Trading took off within days and helped revive interest in Solana.
BONK was later listed on major centralized exchanges. In April 2025 the Bonk community and the Raydium exchange launched LetsBonk.fun, a site for creating new meme tokens that competes with Pump.fun (PUMP); in July 2025 it briefly overtook Pump.fun in daily token launches. In 2025 US fund managers including REX-Osprey and Tuttle Capital filed with the SEC for exchange-traded funds tied to BONK.
How it works
BONK is a standard token on Solana, so transfers settle in under a second and cost a fraction of a cent, with the fee paid in SOL. It has no mining or staking of its own, and no single team can change its supply or freeze holders' tokens. Because each token is worth so little, prices are usually quoted per million BONK, and wallets and exchanges show balances in the millions or billions. Trading happens on Solana's decentralized exchanges and on centralized exchanges. A number of Solana products are built around the coin, such as the BONKbot trading bot and LetsBonk.fun, and some of them use part of their fees to buy BONK on the market.
Supply and burns
The starting supply was about 100 trillion BONK, and no new tokens are minted. Instead the supply shrinks through token burns: tokens are sent to an address from which they can never be spent. About 5 trillion BONK were burned in the first weeks of 2023, and more has been burned since through fees from BONK-linked apps and one-off community events, which gives the coin deflationary tokenomics. The effect of a burn on supply is:
- is the number of tokens burned.
- is the circulating supply before the burn.
In 2025 the community planned to burn 1 trillion BONK once the coin reached 1 million holders, when about 81 trillion were in circulation. That burn equals of the supply. A burn reduces supply but does not by itself create demand.
Criticism and risks
Like other meme coins, BONK has no cash flows or underlying assets, and its price moves sharply with social-media attention and the mood around Solana. A large share of the supply sits in a small number of wallets, including exchange wallets, so large holders can move the market. The launchpads that grew up around it, including LetsBonk.fun, have produced thousands of short-lived tokens, many linked to pump-and-dump schemes and rug pulls. Fund filings are not approvals, and products tied to BONK remain small and high-risk. Because the creators are anonymous and no organisation stands behind the coin, holders have little recourse if a linked app fails or misleads them, and the coin's fate is closely tied to the health of the wider Solana network.