BonkDAO got hit hard. The group behind the BONK memecoin says an attacker drained $20 million from its treasury using a malicious governance proposal.
The project posted on X Monday saying they’d informed law enforcement. They’re working to recover the funds and find who’s responsible. The theft happened on Solana.
BONK launched back in December 2022. It’s one of those dog-themed tokens alongside DOGE and SHIB. Developers airdropped half the total supply at launch. The token dropped about 7% in 24 hours after news of the attack hit — currently trading around $0.05.
The timing isn’t great for memecoins broadly. The total market cap for top memecoins hit a two-year low last week at around $22 billion. It’s recovered a bit to $25.3 billion, but that’s still down more than 54% over the past 12 months.
This isn’t the first DAO-related theft this year. In May, memecoin launch platform DxSale lost $7.3 million after a cyberattack hit liquidity providers on BNB Chain. Sleuths identified the attacker’s wallet, but experts say the infrastructure used to move the funds makes tracing difficult.
BonkDAO hasn’t released technical details yet. No word on whether the governance proposal exploited a code flaw or tricked token holders into voting yes. Either way, $20 million is gone from the treasury.
