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

Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt

One week later, BONK still reigns supreme.

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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.”

This is crazy.

BONK saved Solana on Christmas 2022.

BONK is saving the Solana Saga Phone on Christmas 2023.

Unlike other dog coins, BONK has been the savior of the most battle-tested high-throughout L1.

It’s not just a meme anymore. This is religion.

— Richard | Tensor ⚛️⚡️ (@0xrwu) December 15, 2023

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.

First it was pyth, then jito, now bonk

and there are many more coming

I hope you see that we’re just getting started here

This is what happens when after this many years we finally have a fast, cheap, and scalable blockchain

Accelerate

— mert | helius.dev (d/acc) (@0xMert_) December 15, 2023

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 saved solana from FTXbonk paid artists & devs wen there was no money on chainbonk first sol dog to 1 billionbonk paved way for SPL on coinbasebonk sold out saga phonebonk pump SOL nfts over ETHbonk destroying L2s https://t.co/IyhgTxA8n7

— degen poet (@solanapoet) December 15, 2023

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.

Honestly

This is one of the moments that makes you crack as a dev

You put years into building the best distributed system you can and then a literal JPEG pwns your entire system

This has now happened to Etherem, Solana, Bitcoin, and Arbitrum lol

Godspeed lads https://t.co/FT57pZBKhC

— mert | helius.dev (d/acc) (@0xMert_) December 15, 2023

What’s the value prop of inscriptions on a layer two like Arbitrum? I need to know who is this fucking bored.

— themovingavg (@themovingavg) December 15, 2023

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.