The FTX collapse had shaken confidence across the crypto industry; Solana had been caught in the fallout, and SOL was trading below $10. Against that backdrop, BONK appeared as a new dog-themed token with none of the conventional ingredients of a crypto launch: no presale, no venture-capital round, and no whitepaper.
Instead, BONK was distributed to developers, NFT holders, and active members of the Solana ecosystem. Its creators framed the token as a way to return ownership of the network to the people building and using it. More than half of the supply was allocated to developers and creators across the ecosystem.
That origin story makes BONK more than an early Solana meme coin . It represents one of the clearest starting points for the modern Solana meme era.
Nearly four years later, the formula looks very different.
The rise of dogwifhat, the emergence of Pump.fun, the proliferation of disposable tokens, and the arrival of celebrity-backed coins have progressively changed what a successful meme coin can be. The latest iteration, ANSEM—also known as The Black Bull—offers an almost perfect inversion of BONK's original model.
BONK was essentially a community movement that became a financial asset.
ANSEM began with an existing online personality and turned that personality into the foundation around which a community and financial asset could be built.
BONK Turned Community Into a Meme Coin
BONK's launch was unusual because its distribution was part of its identity.
Rather than selling tokens to investors before launch, the project used an airdrop to distribute roughly half of its supply across the Solana community. Developers, NFT creators and holders, DeFi users, and other ecosystem participants were positioned as the initial owners.
BONK highlights its community-first origins, designed to support Solana’s recovery and empower builders following the FTX collapse. Source: @bonk_inu via X
The message was straightforward: Solana belonged to the people using and building it, rather than venture investors or a small group of insiders.
BONK's own documentation explicitly positioned the token against what it described as predatory VC-backed token launches, arguing that the asset should instead be held by the social layer of the Solana network.
That distinction mattered in late 2022.
The token did not need to convince investors that it had revolutionary technology. It needed to give a battered ecosystem something to rally around.
In that sense, BONK was closer to a social experiment than a conventional startup token. The meme was the language, but the community was the product.
The market eventually turned that community experiment into a major financial asset.
Dogwifhat Made the Meme More Important Than the Mission
By the time dogwifhat appeared in November 2023, the environment had changed.
Solana had recovered from its post-FTX lows, liquidity was returning, and traders were once again looking for assets capable of generating outsized returns.
WIF had a remarkably simple proposition: a Shiba Inu wearing a pink hat.
There was no complicated technological narrative to explain. The meme itself was the thesis.
Upbit listed Solana-based memecoin Dogwifhat (WIF) across KRW, BTC, and USDT trading pairs, with deposits limited to the Solana network. Source: @BSCNews via X
Dogwifhat launched on Solana on November 20, 2023, and its community-driven rise helped establish a new generation of Solana meme coins. By 2024, WIF had reached the ranks of the largest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization and secured major exchange listings.
The distinction from BONK was subtle but important.
BONK's identity was closely tied to the idea of distributing ownership back to the Solana ecosystem. WIF demonstrated that a sufficiently powerful meme could become a financial asset almost entirely through attention, social participation, and speculation.
The community remained important, but the community was increasingly forming around the meme rather than receiving the meme as part of an existing ecosystem movement.
That shift would become much more consequential with Pump.fun.
Pump.fun Industrialized the Meme-Coin Factory
Pump.fun launched in January 2024 and dramatically reduced the barriers to creating a Solana token. Instead of needing a development team, liquidity strategy, and sophisticated launch infrastructure, users could create and immediately trade tokens through the platform.
The result was an explosion in supply.
Meme coins stopped being occasional cultural events and became an industrial process. Anyone with a narrative, image, or joke could attempt to turn it into a tradable asset.
That democratized token creation, but it also changed the economics of attention.
A meme no longer had to survive for months or years to become a successful cryptocurrency. A token could be launched in minutes, promoted across social media, and abandoned just as quickly.
Pump.fun DEX volume chart. Source: DefiLlama
Academic research examining more than 832,000 Pump.fun launches between May 8 and June 10, 2026, found a graduation rate of just 0.198% during the period studied. In other words, the overwhelming majority of tokens did not reach the platform's graduation threshold.
Another study of Pump.fun's role in the Solana ecosystem found that the platform accounted for as much as 71.1% of tokens minted on Solana during parts of late 2024, while fewer than 2% of tokens successfully transitioned to major decentralized exchanges.
The meme coin had become a numbers game.
And as the number of launches increased, so did the opportunities for rugs, coordinated speculation, and increasingly short-lived narratives.
The Meme Coin Became a Vehicle for Attention
The next stage was inevitable.
If anyone could launch a token, the scarce resource was no longer the ability to create the asset. It was attention.
That made personalities, influencers, and celebrities increasingly valuable.
A token attached to an established online audience could begin with something most anonymous meme coins had to spend months trying to build: a ready-made distribution network.
Celebrity coins took that concept into the mainstream. The launch of tokens tied to public figures demonstrated how an existing audience could be converted almost instantly into a speculative market. The phenomenon also intensified criticism that meme coins were becoming vehicles for extracting value from attention rather than building durable communities.
The underlying formula had changed again.
BONK had effectively said: here is a token for the community.
The newer model increasingly said: here is a person, narrative, or moment that can become a token.
ANSEM takes that process a step further.
ANSEM Reverses the BONK Formula
The Black Bull, or ANSEM, launched anonymously through Pump.fun in June 2026.
According to accounts of the launch and on-chain tracking, an anonymous developer purchased the token and sent roughly 650 million ANSEM tokens — about 65% of the supply — directly to the public wallet associated with Ansem, a prominent Solana trader and commentator who uses the handle @blknoiz06. The creator reportedly spent around $6,300 on the initial launch.
Ansem did not create the token.
That point is important.
Instead, an anonymous creator effectively used Ansem's existing attention as the distribution mechanism. Once the tokens landed in his wallet, Ansem chose to embrace the project rather than ignore it.
The token then became a market.
ANSEM price chart. Source: Brave New Coin
Between June 17 and June 24, ANSEM reportedly surged by almost 20,000%, reaching a market capitalization above $140 million at its peak during that initial run.
Ansem subsequently began distributing large amounts of his holdings to other wallets.
By late June, reports based on on-chain tracking put the value of those distributions at roughly $6.7 million to $7 million across more than 700 wallets. The breakdown included one wallet receiving more than $1 million, six receiving more than $100,000, around 40 receiving more than $10,000, and hundreds receiving smaller amounts.
That distribution reinforced the community narrative around ANSEM.
But it also exposed the contradiction at the heart of the project.
The Community Coin Problem
ANSEM can look decentralized when viewed through the number of wallets holding the token.
Yet the initial ownership structure was anything but diffuse.
The anonymous deployer sent the majority of the supply to a single wallet associated with Ansem. Even after the subsequent distributions, on-chain trackers continued to show substantial concentration in the Ansem-linked wallet. One community-built dashboard currently estimates that roughly 60% of supply remains associated with that wallet, although exact ownership percentages can change as tokens move.
That concentration is not necessarily proof of misconduct.
But it is economically significant.
A community can be large while ownership remains concentrated. Hundreds or thousands of wallets can receive tokens without changing the fact that one address originally controlled most of the supply.
That creates a very different form of community ownership from BONK's original distribution model.
With BONK, broad distribution was the starting point.
With ANSEM, broad distribution came later.
The distinction is more than technical. It changes what “community” means.
From Community to Personality, Then Back to Community
This is where the evolution of Solana's meme-coin market becomes clearest.
BONK started with an existing ecosystem and distributed a token across that community. The financial asset emerged from the movement.
Dogwifhat demonstrated that a simple meme could become the center of a community through viral attention.
Pump.fun then industrialized the process, making token creation nearly frictionless and turning attention into the primary scarce resource.
Celebrity coins pushed the model toward existing audiences.
ANSEM represents the next logical step: the personality itself becomes the raw material from which the community is manufactured.
The sequence can therefore be reduced to two opposing formulas.
BONK:
Community → Meme → Token → Financial asset
ANSEM:
Personality → Token → Attention → Community → Financial asset
That is the real evolution.
The technology underneath the tokens has barely changed. Solana still provides the infrastructure, while Pump.fun provides much of the launch machinery.
What changed is the source of value.
The Meme Coin Is Becoming a Social Asset
The history of Solana meme coins is therefore not simply a story about increasingly speculative tokens.
It is a story about the financialization of online attention.
BONK emerged at a moment when Solana's community needed something to rally around. WIF showed how a viral image could create a powerful financial network. Pump.fun turned token creation into an open marketplace for narratives. The celebrity-token era demonstrated that existing audiences could be converted into liquidity almost immediately.
ANSEM takes that logic to its most concentrated form.
An anonymous creator did not need to build a following. The creator effectively outsourced that job to one of the most recognizable personalities in the Solana trading community.
Ansem's decision to embrace the token then supplied the narrative, while subsequent distributions helped transform that narrative into a broader holder base.
The model is powerful because it compresses the traditional process of community formation.
But that efficiency comes with a trade-off.
When a community is created around an existing personality, ownership concentration, influence and financial incentives become much harder to separate. The same person who supplies the attention may also control a substantial amount of the token.
That is fundamentally different from the grassroots mythology that surrounded BONK.
Solana Reinvented the Meme Coin by Financializing It
BONK remains important because it captured an earlier idea of what a successful meme coin could be: a cultural object distributed through a community that eventually acquired financial value.
ANSEM represents almost the opposite.
It begins with an established personality, attaches a token to that personality, and then uses the token itself to construct a community around the resulting market.
Neither model necessarily represents the final form of the meme coin.
But together they show how far the category has moved.
The original Solana meme coin was something a community could rally around.
The modern Solana meme coin can be a mechanism for turning attention, identity, and online influence into a market.
That may be the biggest reinvention of all.
The meme is no longer simply the thing being traded.
The community itself has become the asset.