Bonk launches LetsBonk to evolve beyond its meme coin origin story and compete with Pump.fun

LetsBonk, which allows users to issue their own tokens and meme coins, has already launched nearly 86,000 new coins.

5/22/25 4:49PM

Since its inception at the end of last month, the new meme coin generator LetsBonk has seen more than 85,700 token launches, with cumulative fees so far exceeding 32,194 solana tokens worth about $5.8 million.

Unlike competitor Pump.fun, LetsBonk uses fees generated to buy and burn bonk. “We take the weekly fees from the platform and buy $BONK with the fees in the open market and burn them,” according to a core contributor of the meme coin, who goes by the X username @iamkadense.

Similar to a traditional finance firm that buys its own stock to reduce the number of outstanding shares, token buybacks and burns are deflationary tactics that occur when a crypto project purchases its tokens and permanently removes them from circulation.

Of the total fees, 35%, or roughly 11,300 solana tokens representing $2 million as of Thursday afternoon, has been allocated to buy and burn the bonk meme coin.

LetsBonk is the newest step for bonk, which started in part as a morale-boosting token airdrop for users during the depths of solana’s post-FTX crash.

On-chain data from blockchain explorer Solscan shows 925,234 addresses are currently holding bonk, a higher figure than the trump meme coin, which has 638,328 holders. Parker White, CIO and COO of DeFi Dev Corp, told Sherwood News, “Bonk is more than just a meme coin.”

Why LetsBonk started

A few factors contributed to LetsBonk’s debut in April, @iamkadense explained. First, the US Securities and Exchange Commission provided new regulatory clarity around meme coins.

In February, the staff of the SEC’s Division of Corporation Finance said meme coin transactions do not involve the offer and sale of securities. As such, users typically don’t need to register their meme coin transactions with the SEC, in the view of the division.

The second reason for LetsBonk stems from soured sentiment surrounding Pump.fun, the leading solana meme coin launchpad responsible for fartcoin, pnut, Moo Deng, and goatseus maximus.

@iamkadense pointed at Pump.fun’s fees and what it does with solana tokens as an issue. The platform has accumulated about $646 million in fees since it started last year, data from blockchain analytics platform DefiLlama shows, but the address that collects fees for Pump.fun often sends fees, denominated in solana tokens, to centralized exchange Kraken.

On-chain data from SolScan shows Pump.fun’s fee account has sent more than 1.6 million solana tokens worth over $290 million to Kraken this year alone. The platform’s pseudonymous founder, who goes by the X username @a1lon9, previously said on the social network, “You can send assets to an exchange without intending to sell those assets.”

Though a profitable crypto business doesn’t have an obligation to bring value back to its native blockchain ecosystem, Ryot, the pseudonymous founder of solana-based DeFi project Xitadel, argued that Pump.fun’s deposits to Kraken are not ideal. “It kind of sucks that our ecosystem is being extracted so badly,” Ryot told Sherwood.

LetsBonk’s @iamkadense said, “We have a longstanding reputation for goodwill and community on solana and saw an opportunity to have the benefits of the launchpad stay in the ecosystem.”

Bonk’s new corporate partner

Meanwhile, DeFi Development Corp. announced last week a joint venture with the bonk community that entails operating a validator to secure the solana network. The fees earned from the validator operations will be divided between DeFi Dev Corp and bonk, DeFi Dev Corp’s White said.

White told Sherwood, “The bonk team intends to use these proceeds to purchase $BONK, while the DeFi Dev Corp team will use them to add to our balance sheet and increase $SOL per share.”

Even though the market cap of bonk has decreased about 23% in the year to roughly $1.7 billion, the meme coin has increased 61% in the last 30 days.

In the stock market, DeFi Dev Corp has seen a sharper rise. The solana-focused company has seen its stock increase over 6,000% since early April, when former Kraken execs got a majority stake in the company formerly known as Janover and relaunched it as Defi Dev to focus on becoming the Strategy of solana.

Sage D. Young6/16/26

Hyperliquid reclaims all-time high

HYPE, the native token powering perpetuals exchange Hyperliquid and its underlying blockchain, rebounded to reclaim its all-time high previously set at the start of the month.

Treasury firms Hyperliquid Strategies and Hyperion DeFi have also rallied as the token increased double digits in the last 24 hours to trade as high as $76.70, rising past its record price set nearly two weeks ago, according to CoinGecko. In the interim between all-time highs, HYPE pulled back to around $53.

The token has several tailwinds, the first coming from ETF flows. Since their inception in May, HYPE ETFs have yet to record negative weekly outflows, posting a cumulative total net inflow of $171.8 million, per SoSoValue.

The second comes from Hyperliquid spending basically everything it earns in fees to buy HYPE, a mechanism embedded into the protocol’s codebase.

The venue’s buyback funding mechanism is set to add a new source of yield. Validators of the network activated “AQAv2,” which means stablecoin deployers will share about 90% of reserve yield revenue on their supply within the protocol.

Around $6.1 billion of Circle’s USDC resides in Hyperliquid, per DefiLlama. Accrual begins on August 26 and the first payment is made on October 3, the network announced in its Discord channel last week.

A substantial amount of capital is riding on different positions of HYPE. In total, a move down to under $53 would result in the liquidation nearly 1.8 million HYPE worth of leveraged long positions on the on-chain perps venue, or $131.7 million, data from CoinGlass shows. For the upside, a climb above $100 results in the liquidation of more than 3 million worth of leveraged HYPE short positions, or $221.5 million.

HYPE’s rebound to all-time high comes after Michael Selig, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, defended his agency’s decision to approve regulated perpetuals, or futures contracts without expiration dates, CNBC reported on Monday.

Last month, the CFTC approved bitcoin perpetual futures trading in the US through regulated prediction markets firm Kalshi and an affiliate of centralized exchange Coinbase.

“Perps are highly likely to become lightly regulated and thus approved in the US,” said David Pakman, head of venture investments at CoinFund.

“We expect to see perps for many different types of assets, from commodities to equities,” Pakman told Sherwood News.

Yaël Bizouati-Kennedy

6/16/26

Bitcoin is “caught between flow deterioration and macro relief”

Sage D. Young6/15/26

Crypto market snaps back as sentiment lifts, with altcoins from ethereum to XRP soaring

The market capitalization of the crypto industry has jumped around $83.2 billion in the last 24 hours, with privacy-focused token Zcash and worldcoin, the native cryptocurrency of the network backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, leading market gains, jumping over 22%.

But the last 24 hours have been good across the board:

Ethereum has increased more than 9% to trade above $1,800, amid BitMine Immersion Technologies acquiring $139.2 million worth of ethereum.
XRP and solana have rebounded from multiyear lows, each rising roughly 10%.
HYPE has bounced up 12%.
Dog-based memecoins dogecoin and shiba inu have chased gains of more than 4%.

“Investors have been eager to see some positive signs around the Iranian conflict ending, coupled with hopeful outlooks around the CLARITY act, both breathing some life into assets,” Kairos Research cofounder Ian Unsworth told Sherwood News.

Simon Shockey, a crypto strategist at crypto wallet infrastructure firm Privy, said the upswing stems from several things converging. He pointed to how alt markets broadly were “very oversold” following the bug found in Zcash that shook confidence.

Friday, Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox said Anthropic didn’t find any more serious bugs with the Zcash protocol after Shielded Labs requested the AI firm run a security audit of the network with Mythos.

Shockey added that the pool of willing sellers has dwindled. “Even if structurally, AI is a much more compelling and asymmetric bet in the eyes of allocators, many of these crypto assets have simply run out of marginal sellers despite some shorter-term narrative-driven pumps. The only people left to sell at this point are the teams themselves and VCs.”

“Net-net: oversold conditions plus exhausted seller bases plus a macro backdrop that’s stabilized equals a snapback, especially in names that have real usage or community conviction behind them,” Shockey told Sherwood.

Yaël Bizouati-Kennedy

6/15/26

Bitcoin hits highest level in 2 weeks following news of Iran deal

Bitcoin crossed $66,500 Monday morning as the broad crypto market welcomed the return of a risk-on mood.