blockworks.co
Humanity has for centuries put dogs on their money — ancient Romans frequently did it and so did the Greeks.
Now, thousands of years later, dog-themed cryptocurrencies (or dog coins) are so popular that they’re outperforming practically the entire market.
Dogecoin (DOGE) — the largest dog coin worth $12 billion — has popped 43% over the past month to nearly eclipse cardano’s (ADA) market cap.
Floki (FLOKI) has almost doubled while shiba inu (SHIB) has gained more than a quarter — outstripping ether, XRP, tron (TRX) and binance coin (BNB) since this time in October.
Solana-native dog coin Bonk ($BONK) has them all with a very hairy 1,400% rally.
That’s far ahead of the top 25 cryptocurrencies by market cap, which on average have gained 40%, with top-two bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH) each eking out about 25%.
Solana ($SOL) is in second place with 142% gains, with $BONK perhaps benefitting from renewed interest in the layer-1 blockchain. Avalanche (AVAX) follows with 130% as hype swirls around its part in tokenization trials by JPMorgan for Project Guardian.
$BONK is now close to retesting its price record set days after its January debut, after which it had tanked more than 95%. $BONK funding rates have spiked on Solana perpetual futures DEX platform Drift with speculators paying upwards of 1.4% per day for the privilege of being long. Liquidity providers on decentralized exchange Orca’s $BONK/$SOL pair have been netting more than 1% per day to keep spot trading flowing.
$BONK’s outperforming price can mostly be explained by its tiny market value — under $8 million before its recent pump to around $125 million. Its average daily volume has also been very low — under $3 million for most of the year — so any sudden upticks in trading activity would’ve easily moved the needle.
There’s not much to $BONK. As is the case with most memecoins, it’s really more of a tokenized idea.
$BONK presents itself as the fun-loving heart of the Solana community — billed as “the first Solana dog coin for the people.”
Its creators first airdropped half of the supply to certain Solana users last Christmas — a pick-me-up after the whole Sam Bankman-Fried fraud thing, which put a real dampener on being a Solana investor on account of his outsized influence throughout the network’s ecosystem.
Most people don't remember this
— mert | helius.dev (@0xMert_) November 12, 2023
But @bonk_inu airdropped thousands of dollars to @LamportDAO devs during the bottom of the bear
This money helped keep many devs on this chain
This chain comeback really was due to the entire community working together pic.twitter.com/jxJUODFXuc
Since then, its showrunners (along with a dedicated DAO) have opted to find growth in securing the most “integrations” possible across DeFi, gambling apps and wallets — now at 131, according to its website.
Each integration is intended to serve a slightly different use-case, such as “BonkOrBust,” which allows $BONK bets on which color the next one-minute candle will be, something similar to one-minute futures.
Blue-chips like Bitcoin and Ethereum boost the legitimacy of the digital asset space, to the point that world-leading asset managers like BlackRock want a piece of the pie.
But the dog coins — which in many ways better reflect crypto’s true chaotic nature — clearly aren’t going anywhere.
Macauley Peterson contributed reporting