Meme coin bonk passes $TRUMP in market capitalization

Solana has a new meme coin leader. 

Dog-based cryptocurrency bonk jumped 57.6% in the last seven days, reaching a market capitalization of roughly $1.73 billion, dethroning the president’s $TRUMP token, which sits at a $1.72 billion market cap. Bonk is now the most valuable meme coin in the Solana ecosystem and the fourth-largest meme coin overall, behind dogecoin, shiba inu, and pepe. 

Crypto users have generated over $1 billion in trading volume for bonk over the last 24 hours, multitudes higher than last week when the figure was under $200 million, data pulled from CoinGecko shows.

“I don’t think bonk flipping $TRUMP has much direct signal to it when examined alone, but bonk’s re-rating is certainly important,” Ian Unsworth, cofounder of crypto research firm Kairos, said. 

LetsBonk leaps in platform activity

Bonk’s price action comes as its meme coin launchpad, LetsBonk.Fun, has seen an increase in activity. LetsBonk jumpstarted a hackathon competition on Sunday as several meme coins emerging from the token launchpad have reached new all-time high valuations.

USELESS, a token that rolled out in May from LetsBonk, has had a meteoric rise and now has a market cap of $255 million with a liquidity level of $3.7 million, per analytics trading platform DexTools. 

Meanwhile, LetsBonk’s daily fees on Sunday reached a record level, surpassing $1 million, according to blockchain analytics firm DefiLlama. Half of the platform’s fees generated from on-chain activity, such as token launches, are dedicated to the buyback and burning of the bonk meme coin. LetsBonk has earmarked 34,453 solana tokens, or $5.2 million at current prices, to date for the buyback and burning of bonk. 

Pump.Fun, responsible for fartcoin, pnut, and Moo Deng, is one of the most successful crypto applications, generating over $830 million in fees since its inception last year. LetsBonk started in part as a response to Pump.Fun as bonk contributors noticed that smart contracts belonging to Pump.Fun have sent solana tokens stemming from its fees to centralized exchange Kraken instead of keeping the attained value within the on-chain economy. 

“The bonk re-rating is largely a reflection of coiled anticipation for PumpFun exposure, and Pump is rumored to launch at $4 billion FDV [fully diluted valuation],” Unsworth told Sherwood News. Bloomberg reported in June that PumpFun is planning to raise $1 billion at a $4 billion valuation by selling tokens.