After FTX collapsed at the end of 2022, the Solana ecosystem was left in ruins.
Without institutional backing or venture capital support, a group of ordinary developers and community members came together and airdropped 50% of the total supply directly to Solana users. They created a dog and named it BONK.
Three years later, the dog appeared on jerseys and advertising boards at Borussia Dortmund's home stadium.
If you still use the "Meme Project" framework to understand BONK, you may have missed something quite important.
Community-based projects are undergoing a silent split.
Before 2024, the logic in this circle was very simple:
Community consensus drives prices, prices generate more consensus, until the bubble bursts and the next one appears. The cycle repeats. This logic isn't wrong, but it describes the average level for most projects.
What will truly change the market in 2025-2026 is that a few projects start doing something counterintuitive— treating the spread of memes as the starting point of their business, rather than the end point .
The track is splitting into two categories:
One type is called consumable projects : they rely on narratives to consume market attention, which is essentially attention arbitrage.
One type is called infrastructure projects : using meme identities to lower the barrier to entry for users, and using actual products to retain users.
The gap between these two categories is widening.
How did the Meme project expand to Web2? The answer isn't "marketing."
Many people understand "breaking out of their niche" as finding internet celebrities, getting on the news, and advertising on Web2 platforms.
But that's only the surface.
The true expansion of Web2 is about enabling an on-chain ecosystem to generate real utility or emotional connection for ordinary people.
BONK's proposed path is more systematic than I expected.
Path 1: Sports Sponsorship – Making it accessible to ordinary people in their daily lives
Borussia Dortmund (BVB) is a Bundesliga powerhouse with tens of millions of fans worldwide. BONK becoming its international technology partner means that BONK's brand is appearing before an audience unrelated to crypto. These people may not engage immediately, but they are beginning to know it exists.
The same logic extends to baseball, American football, and karate fighting leagues.
This is using the attention of sports audiences to lower the barrier for "outside users" to get to know BONK.
Path Two: Compliant Financial Products – Providing Channels for Traditional Funds to Enter
- NASDAQ: BNKK — Bonk Inc. is listed on NASDAQ, allowing institutional investors to access the Bonk ecosystem through traditional securities markets.
- Osprey BONK Trust ($OBNK) – OTCQX Market, compliant channels for participation.
- Bitcoin Capital AG BONK ETP – Listed on the Swiss exchange SIX, allowing European users to hold BONK exposure through the ETP.
The three pathways cover Nasdaq, the OTC market, and traditional European stock exchanges.
An on-chain ecosystem is legally accessing Web2 funding through traditional financial channels.
Path Three: Health Apps – Integrating the Spirit of Ecology into Daily Habits
Moonwalk Fitness is an on-chain fitness application within the BONK ecosystem: users stake BONK/SOL/USDC, set step goals, and receive their principal back upon reaching the goal; any shortfall is distributed among the winners.
The target users are not blockchain veterans, but ordinary people who want to use blockchain mechanisms to motivate themselves to exercise.
Designing on-chain mechanisms into everyday habits is the deepest form of Meme ecosystem penetration into Web2.
Are these types of projects still worth paying attention to? This question needs to be phrased differently.
The question "Are meme projects worth paying attention to?" has a flawed premise—it treats all similar projects as the same type of asset.
A more accurate question would be: What kind of projects have a logical basis for long-term holding?
Three dimensions for judgment:
- Is the product revenue genuine?
Truly valuable projects can provide real on-chain revenue data.
BONK's revenue for the full year of 2025 was $1.47 million, and its revenue for Q1 2026 was $1.44 million, representing a 45.7% increase quarter-over-quarter. The main sources of revenue were BONKfun (a community project launch platform on Solana) and BONKbot (a Telegram trading terminal).
Projects whose revenue does not depend on market fluctuations but comes from actual user engagement on the platform have the characteristic of "having a core user base even during market downturns".
- Does the burn mechanism create true deflation?
The BONKfun platform uses 50% of its platform fees to buy back and burn BONK, directly converting product revenue into ecosystem deflation. To date, over 12 trillion BONK has been burned, representing approximately 12% of the initial supply, and this figure changes daily.
- Does the community actually exist? Is it sufficiently dispersed?
With over 1.1 million holders, 67.2% of the airdrop BONK are still held by the original recipients. The holder structure is sufficiently dispersed, not dominated by a few whale, and the stability of the community's belief is relatively reliable.
An overlooked fact
When BONK was born, it was like a match lit by a group of people during a bear market.
It is now a network with 400+ integrations, 13 chains, and 55+ exchanges; it is a brand on the Dortmund stadium; it is an ETP on the Swiss SIX exchange; and it is a matrix of on-chain products that generate real revenue every day.
From community memes to real-world ecosystems, from on-chain to Web2, this path is not one that every project can successfully navigate.
