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