What BONK’s 900% Surge Means for Solana

When cultivating a community or selling niche products in Web3, it appears a dash of FOMO or speculation can certainly make a difference.

As the Solana-based meme coin BONK spikes past a $1.75 billion market cap, arbitragers are moving quickly to capitalize on the once-beleaguered Solana Saga phone. Released by Solana Labs this year, each phone also unlocks an airdrop of BONK that’s outpaced the device’s $599 price tag, as of this writing.

“You can build a community around crypto fundamentals, whatever that truly means,” said Austin Federa, Head of Strategy at the Solana Foundation. “We can also build a community around something being fun and holding a token.”

Meme-based magic can materialize swiftly sometimes. When Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakoveno spoke with Coinage in Round 1 of Crypto Project of the Year, he described the Saga as a tough learning experience — not a sold-out product in the U.S. The week prior, Yakovenko wondered if continuing its mobile endeavor even made sense. An initial goal of selling 50,000 Saga phones appeared unlikely to be hit as sales slumped.

“I think there was something like 3,000 sales of the Saga in the first half of the year,” Federa said. “It was not a huge financial success.”

What a difference a week makes.

On Wednesday, Coinbase announced it would be adding trading for BONK. The token's price spiked 70%. People quickly jumped on the opportunity to snag millions of BONK by buying a Saga phone.

Now that about 20,000 devices are out in the wild (in the U.S.), the Saga’s custom app store, home to several decentralized apps, could potentially chip away at Apple’s iOS App Store and the Google Play Store, according to Yakoveno. And germinating that user base through BONK boils down to how Web3 groups often form, Federa said.

“There's this thing that happens with all of these communities, where you build community through incentivization — through shared upside — and that was one of the side effects of Saga,” he said.  

But could a canine-themed coin disrupt tech giants like Google and Apple on its own? Among Solana-based projects, Federa highlighted Helium Mobile, a crypto-powered wireless network that transitioned to Solana earlier this year, as a promising Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks or DePIN project.

“It's been great to have Helium come on board,” he said. “It’s attracted a lot of other DePIN networks to Solana as well,” he added, referring to the Render Network.

Helium’s service taps users’ phones to build a coverage map based on various signal strengths that are present in a given area, Federa said, describing the dynamic as somewhat synergistic because Helium users are rewarded with tokens as a result.

“That's real valuable data for cell phone companies and Helium,” he said. “BONK is probably the most well-known component of what the Saga offered to folks, but there was an ability to mint a Claynosaurz NFT — there were all sorts of other things that came with this experience.”

Solana advanced past Optimism in Round 1 voting among our community of NFT holders, while Phaver topped Pudgy Penguins.

Which project deserves to progress in Coinage’s Crypto Project of the Year? Coinage Membership Pass holders can watch the full video above and vote on which projects advance in our celebration of crypto’s top projects. Don’t have a Membership Pass? Mint one now!