Incredible Heist in Solana’s Giant Meme Coin: Spends $4 Million to Snag $21 Million

An attacker profited approximately $16.8 million by manipulating the governance system to steal $21.2 million worth of tokens from the Bonk (BONK) treasury.

Bonk (BONK), one of the most popular meme coin projects on the Solana network, fell victim to a rare governance attack in the crypto world. According to on-chain data shared by Lookonchain, a user managed to drain the treasury into their own wallet by exploiting the project’s democratic voting mechanism.

The events began on June 30 with a proposal numbered “BIP #76” submitted by the attacker on BonkDAO. This proposal requested the transfer of 4.426 trillion BONK tokens from the treasury directly to a wallet under the attacker’s control. Examining the data in the images, the quorum required for the proposal’s approval was 879.95 billion tokens.

Million-Dollar Manipulation in Bonk Governance

To get the proposal approved, the attacker spent approximately $4.4 million on the Binance and Bybit exchanges over the last two days to purchase 882.285 billion BONK tokens. This amount was sufficient to surpass the voting quorum. Voting “Yes” with their own tokens, the attacker used 99.9% of the votes single-handedly to automatically approve the proposal.

Upon the conclusion of the vote, $21.2 million worth of assets were transferred from the treasury to the attacker’s wallet. According to current data, approximately $188,000 of the stolen funds were sent to the OKX exchange. The remaining 4.386 trillion tokens, worth $19.3 million, are still being held in the attacker’s main wallet. This incident has once again highlighted the security vulnerabilities in decentralized governance models.