New memecoin Bonk saw a 300% price return in the first 8 days, compared to 141 days for Shiba Inu and 1,253 days for Dogecoin
New Solana-based memecoin Bonk (BONK) has seen exponential growth since its launch on December 25, 2022, quickly surpassing 300% price return in the first 8 days – more specifically, achieving a 305.8% price return on January 2, 2023. Compared to popular memecoin Shiba Inu (SHIB), 141 days were taken to exceed the same threshold, since its launch in August 2020. Bonk’s phenomenal growth is further contrasted with that of the first-ever memecoin Dogecoin (DOGE) launched in 2013, where 1,253 days lapsed before DOGE went beyond the 300% price return threshold.
Within 11 days from its launch, Bonk’s price peaked and hit an all-time high of $0.00000487 on January 5, 2023, and saw a gain of 3,649%, a 36X increase in value. BONK crossed $200 million in market capitalization that same day, peaking at a market cap of $204,964,399 before dropping to around $82 million on January 7, and subsequently sliding to $62 million.
Bonk’s launch strategy, which involved airdropping 50% of its total supply to a wide base of Solana users, drove its price spike
Bonk’s launch involved airdrops in multiple stages. First announced in a tweet on December 10, 2022 and in their one-pager, 20% of BONK’s supply was to be airdropped to holders of 40 Solana NFT collections – some notable ones include y00ts, Solana Monkey Business, and Degen Ape Academy.
Subsequently, 15% of its total supply were airdropped to early openbook traders, 10% to Solana artists and collectors and finally 5% to developers of the Solana blockchain. To sum, the airdrop made up 50% of its total supply of 100 trillion coins, resulting in a high market capitalization days upon launch and generated buzz on crypto Twitter, which further hyped up demand.
Bonk’s airdrop tactic greatly contrasts Shiba Inu’s infamous SHIB token airdrop in August 2020. SHIB’s anonymous creator, Ryoshi first locked 50% of total token supply in Uniswap to ensure liquidity, and then sent the remaining 50% of all tokens to Ethereum co-founder, Vitalik Buterin’s ERC-20 wallet. Unexpectedly, Vitalik burned 90% of the tokens received, and donated the remaining 10% to charity.
Bonk’s phenomenal growth contributed to Solana’s 63% price pump
The financial impact of FTX’s collapse extended to Solana, given that the now-defunct cryptocurrency exchange owned large sums of Solana’s native token, SOL. With multiple projects abandoning the Solana ecosystem, SOL has been on a downward trend since.
Yet, with Bonk creators setting out to flip the toxic ‘Alameda’ tokenomics narrative through the Solana-based memecoin, SOL has seen a resurgence in recent days, attributed to BONK’s phenomenal growth that coincided with a short squeeze happening in the same period. Its price has jumped 63.5%, from $9.97 on January 2 to $16.30 on January 10, 2023.
Methdology
This study examines the percentage price returns of Bonk (BONK), Dogecoin (DOGE) and Shiba Inu (SHIB) in USD, from January 1, 2021 to January 10, 2023.
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What is Bonk?
Bonk (BONK) is the first dog-themed memecoin of the Solana blockchain and described as ‘for the people, by the people.’ Created entirely for fun, Bonk has little or no real-world utility. Since its launch, the Bonk team has burned 5 trillion BONK tokens, equivalent to 5% of its total supply, allocated for team development, and has just launched 15,000 non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on Magic Eden, on Tuesday January 10, 2023.
Curious to find out more about our previous research studies? Check out this one we did comparing Reddit NFTs‘ growth with Ethereum Name Service, Unstoppable Domains and POAP.
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Julia Ng
Julia leads Growth at CoinGecko and is passionate about onboarding more women onto Web3. That said, she is generally poor at timing the market, so she DCAs for safety.
Follow the author on Twitter @ngxinyajulia
