Updated 28 October 2026: rewritten, expanded and fact-checked against the sources listed in the article.
Kraken temporarily suspended deposits and withdrawals of BONK, the Solana-based meme coin, on 6 July 2026. The exchange cited an incident affecting the BONK token, Reuters reported. The incident was an attack on BonkDAO, the community organisation behind the token. Earlier that day a malicious governance proposal had moved about 4.43 trillion BONK, worth roughly $20 million, out of the DAO’s treasury.
A snapshot of Kraken’s status page, captured by StatusSight, logged the BONK funding suspension as starting at 18:24:47 on 6 July. Kraken told clients that BONK held in their accounts remained safe and that it would resume service once it was confident it was safe to do so. The suspension covered moving BONK on and off the exchange.
Corrections: an earlier version of this article said the cause was unspecified and that Kraken had halted Bonk trading. It also quoted an analyst, “Jane Doe”, who does not exist, said BONK traded at “approximately $0.0004” and said the token launched in late 2021. Those claims were wrong and have been removed or corrected below.
What happened to BONK on 6 July
The attack used BonkDAO’s own governance rules, not a software bug. According to post-mortems by Rekt, Halborn and Hypernative:
- 30 June: an anonymous wallet submitted Bonk Improvement Proposal #76, “Sowellian BonkDAO”, on Realms, Solana’s DAO governance platform. The proposal was framed as a reward for yes-voters, but it also contained an instruction to transfer the treasury to an attacker-controlled address.
- Weak settings: the DAO needed yes-votes equal to only about 1% of supply to pass a proposal. Its instruction hold-up time was zero seconds, so a passed proposal executed immediately, with no timelock in which anyone could step in.
- 4-5 July: the attacker bought just over 1% of circulating supply, about 882 billion BONK, for roughly $4.4 million. Rekt says part of it was borrowed through marginfi.
- 6 July, 09:42 UTC: the vote closed with about 882.4 billion BONK in favour and 710.8 million against. Turnout was about 2.9%.
- Execution: 4,426,104,450,305 BONK left the treasury in a single transaction. Rekt valued it at about $19.3 million at the time, and BonkDAO put the loss at about $20 million.
BonkDAO confirmed the attack on X the same day. Bitcoin.com reported that the DAO said it was working with exchanges, bridges and the Solana Foundation. It said it had identified the exchange wallets used to buy BONK ahead of the vote, and that it had notified law enforcement.
Why exchanges paused BONK transfers
Once a treasury is drained, the stolen tokens usually head for exchanges where they can be sold. Rekt, citing Chainalysis, said the voting wallet sold about $5.3 million of BONK roughly an hour after the drain. About nine hours later $188,000 was sent to an exchange, and the remaining roughly $19 million moved to a newly created multisig wallet.
Pausing deposits stops an exchange from receiving those tokens while it checks addresses. Pausing withdrawals protects it while the situation is unclear. Kraken was not alone: Rekt and ForkLog reported that South Korea’s Upbit also suspended BONK transfers. For background on why exchanges freeze specific tokens and what it means for customers’ balances, see our guide to frozen crypto exchange withdrawals.
Price impact
BONK fell about 8% on the news, Bitcoin.com reported, and was already down more than 80% over 12 months. ForkLog, citing CoinGecko, put the price at about $0.00000432 on 7 July after a 7.7% daily drop. Yahoo Finance daily data, which rounds to six decimal places, shows BONK closing at $0.000005 on 5 July and $0.000004 on 6 July.
The earlier figure of $0.0004 was about 100 times too high. BONK also did not launch in 2021. CoinGecko describes its launch on Christmas Day 2022, with an airdrop of half the supply to Solana community members.
What happened next
Update, 28 October 2026:
- By 10 July, Rekt reported that no funds had been frozen, no one had been charged and the drained tokens were still under the attacker’s control. Rekt said BONK settled about 93% below its all-time high after the attack.
- Hypernative’s 16 July analysis said the attacker later withdrew the roughly $4.09 million of BONK used to swing the vote. That made the attack almost costless apart from transaction fees.
- A StatusSight snapshot taken about 13 days after the incident still showed Kraken’s BONK suspension as ongoing. We could not find a dated Kraken notice confirming when deposits and withdrawals resumed. Check status.kraken.com for the current status before sending BONK to Kraken.
- Yahoo Finance data shows BONK at about $0.000003 on 28 October 2026, below its level before the attack.
Why it matters
The BonkDAO case is a governance failure, not a code exploit. A low approval threshold, low turnout and no execution delay let one buyer take over a treasury worth roughly four and a half times what the votes cost. For token holders, the useful questions are how much supply it takes to pass a proposal, whether there is a timelock, and who can veto a transfer.
For exchange users, a pause like Kraken’s is a precaution, not a loss of funds. Kraken said balances were safe. The practical risk is that you cannot move the token on or off the exchange until the pause ends. Kraken has paused single-network funding before, as in its USDe deposits and withdrawals on Avalanche, and it later faced wider withdrawal delays in August.
Sources
- Reuters via TradingView: Kraken says Bonk deposits and withdrawals temporarily suspended (6 Jul 2026)
- StatusSight snapshot of Kraken status page (BONK incident from 6 Jul 2026)
- Rekt: BonkDAO – Rekt (10 Jul 2026)
- Halborn: Explained: The BonkDAO hack (July 2026)
- Hypernative: The Bonk DAO governance drain (16 Jul 2026)
- Bitcoin.com: BonkDAO treasury loses $20M (6 Jul 2026)
- ForkLog: BonkDAO loses $20M due to malicious proposal (7 Jul 2026)
- CoinGecko: Bonk (BONK) profile
- Yahoo Finance daily closing data for BONK-USD, retrieved 28 Oct 2026
Explainer: Exchange Froze Withdrawals? What to Do When a Crypto Exchange Halts Withdrawals
Corrections: An earlier version said Kraken suspended BONK trading (it paused deposits and withdrawals), put BONK at about $0.0004 (it was about $0.0000043), said BONK launched in late 2021 (it launched in December 2022) and quoted an analyst we could not identify; the quote was removed.
How this article was made: first published on 6 July 2026 as an AI-assisted rewrite of a news report (original report by Reuters: TradingView News). On 28 October 2026 it was rewritten and expanded with AI assistance, and its facts and figures were checked against the primary sources linked above; errors in the earlier version are listed above. How we work · Report an error
