BONK Goes Bust? Solana Meme Coin Plunges 44% After Setting All-Time High

BONK has been one of the biggest stories in crypto the last few weeks, as the meme coin surged nearly 1,000% in a matter of weeks while the broader Solana ecosystem found new life. But meme coins are famously volatile, and BONK has plunged substantially since hitting a new all-time peak last week.

The dog-themed coin skyrocketed last week to a new high price of $0.00003416 on Friday, but has since fallen to a current price of $0.00001931, per data from CoinGecko—a nearly 44% drop in a matter of days. It’s only down about 1% over the past 24 hours after gradually sliding over the last few days.

Amazingly, the drop only erases about a day’s worth of gains for the Solana-based coin, as BONK hit this price last Thursday before blasting off further to new peaks. Even with this latest downturn, BONK is up 56% over the last seven days, and 502% in the past 30 days.

This isn’t the first time that BONK has seen an aggressive rise followed by a substantial dip. BONK launched this time last year and then saw a dramatic rise and fall in early January, albeit on a much smaller scale: The latest peak price is 10 times higher than the top price seen in January.

BONK still has a market cap of $1.17 billion, making it the 60th largest cryptocurrency by that metric. It’s still the third-largest dog-themed coin after Dogecoin and the Ethereum-based Shiba Inu (SHIB). As of this writing, the two largest dog-themed coins have market caps of $13 billion and $6 billion, respectively.

Half of the BONK supply was airdropped to the Solana community beginning last December, with tokens granted to developers, artists, NFT collectors, and others in the space.

For example, developers in the LamportDAO community were each granted 25 billion BONK tokens last Christmas, worth about $300 at the time. Even following the recent dip, that sum of tokens is worth approximately $485,000 at the current price.

Solana (SOL) itself is up nearly 5% on the day to a current price of $74, marking a 24% jump over the past month. It’s still down substantially from an all-time high price of about $260 set in November 2021—but has climbed significantly since late last year, when it plunged to a price of just above $8 following the collapse of crypto exchange FTX.

Edited by Stacy Elliott.