This Week on Crypto Twitter: BONK Simply Won’t Quit

One week later, BONK still reigns supreme. 

However improbable, the dog-themed Solana meme coin has spent yet another week dominating frenzied discourse on Crypto Twitter, after showing no signs of letting up its weeks-long, monster streak. The coin is up 796% in the last month, according to CoinGecko.

After soaring to new all-time highs this week, and blowing past a market capitalization of $1 billion (since yesterday, the coin’s market cap has already almost doubled to $1.758 billion), BONK received a further injection of momentum after savvy Solana users realized that the BONK that comes with the purchase of any Solana Saga smartphone is now worth more than the phone’s asking price. 

With BONK’s enduring success now lifting numerous other projects in the Solana ecosystem,  Twitter users doubled down on their fervent, diehard support for the seemingly miraculous dog-themed token. 

“It’s not just a meme anymore,” Richard Wu, co-founder of Solana NFT marketplace Tensor, posted Friday. “This is religion.” 

 The Solana community took several victory laps regarding BONK this week, narrativizing the coin’s success as just the latest episode proving Solana’s superiority compared to other blockchains.

Other Solana users went so far as to gloat that BONK, at this point, has not only “saved Solana from FTX” and “sold out” the Solana saga phone, among other exploits; it’s also, they (perhaps jokingly) claim, destroyed many rival layer-2 blockchains with the raw force of its power. 

BONK is admittedly powerful these days; but probably not that powerful. On Friday, Ethereum scaling blockchain Arbitrum went dark for over an hour, following an extreme surge in network activity. As it turns out, Arbitrum was only the latest layer-2 blockchain to suffer at the hands of users experimenting with costly, seemingly redundant and network-clogging inscriptions. 

Some blockchain developers expressed their frustration at the development, and the ability of such allegedly juvenile transactions to hamstring some of crypto’s biggest blockchains—even ascendant Solana.   

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.