On 6 July, BonkDAO was subjected to a governance attack in which about 4.4 trillion BONK was transferred from the DAO vault, amounting to approximately $19.3 million at the time of transfer. The incident did not involve the theft of private keys or a traditional contractual loophole, but rather the attackers completed the transfer of funds through the governance process itself.

Funds transferred to two addresses

The chain data show that this batch of BONK was transferred from the BonkDAO vault after 4 a.m. U.S.T. time, to JHvQ's address. Solscan records that this address relates to the source of funds for the Bybit account.

By about 3:30 p.m. on the same day, the token was transferred to another Solana address, with the tail number eh42. As at the time of sending the original text, there were no further decentralized records of the two addresses.

Malicious proposal approved through governance platform

This financial loss is related to Bonk Interim #76. The proposal, entitled “Sowellian BonkDAO”, was submitted through the BonkDAO Governance Platform and was adopted. The proposal included the replacement of members and committees, disposal of warehouses, etc., and stated that BONK incentives would be awarded to the address that had voted in favour.

But some of the rewards were not delivered. The currency transferred was not distributed to voters, but was transferred to a second address after hours. In the original version, the attackers bought enough BONK before voting to gain sufficient weight in governance and then pushed the proposal through the chain.

Exchange suspended BONK

BonkDAO subsequently indicated that it had identified the exchange wallet used to buy BONK before the proposal was identified. This means that the accumulation of the relevant hold was subsequently visible but could not be intercepted in time.

Following the incident, the Korea Exchange Upbit and the United States Exchange Kraken suspended the BONK refilling and cashing. According to Upbit, this was done because of the user protection measures following a security incident. On platform X, BonkDAO stated that law enforcement had been notified and was working with the Centralized Exchange, the Network Bridge and the Solana Foundation to trace funds.

On the market, BONK fell by about 7 per cent within 24 hours of the incident, reporting about US$ 0.000043. If the tokens follow into the current market, there is a risk of further price pressure.