BonkDAO Lost $20M Following DAO Governance Attack

The BonkDAO project lost approximately $20 million in BONK tokens after an attacker exploited vulnerabilities in the platform's governance voting system.

On June 30, he submitted a proposal to transfer 4.43 trillion BONK from the project's treasury to his own wallet. For the proposal to pass, it needed to reach the minimum quorum required by the platform's rules.

Over the course of several days, the attacker purchased approximately $4.4 million worth of BONK tokens through Binance and Bybit exchanges — enough to single-handedly push his own proposal through.

In the end, only seven wallets participated in the vote, while more than 18,000 token holders did not cast a ballot. The proposal reached the minimum required quorum, after which the system automatically transferred approximately $20 million in BONK tokens from the project's treasury to the attacker's wallet.

He subsequently began selling the tokens he had accumulated for voting purposes, and moved the majority of the withdrawn funds to a separate wallet.

BonkDAO stated that the incident was a direct result of the project's governance model. If a single individual temporarily accumulates enough tokens, they can gain decisive influence over a vote — particularly when the majority of participants are inactive.

The BonkDAO team announced that it is already working with exchanges, the Solana Foundation, and law enforcement agencies to trace the movement of funds and identify the attacker.