BonkDAO Says Malicious Governance Proposal Drained $20M Treasury

BonkDAO was hit by a malicious governance proposal that drained an estimated $20 million worth of BONK from its treasury, pushing another Solana-linked security incident into the center of the memecoin market.

The attack used BonkDAO’s governance process rather than a direct smart-contract exploit, giving the attacker a route into treasury assets through an approved proposal. BonkDAO said it is working with exchanges, bridges, the Solana Foundation and law enforcement as stolen funds move through the market.

The project identified exchange wallets used to accumulate voting power before the proposal passed through Solana’s Realms governance platform. Public summaries of the incident placed the attacker’s voting-power build-up near $4 million worth of BONK before the treasury transfer was executed.

BONK recently traded near $0.00000441 after falling from an intraday high of $0.00000493, leaving the token under pressure as traders absorbed the treasury drain and recovery response.

Governance Attack Hits Solana Memecoin Treasury

The BonkDAO incident turns governance design into the failure point. The attacker did not need to break Solana consensus or drain user wallets directly. Control over enough voting power allowed a treasury-moving proposal to clear the DAO’s process.

That puts the focus on proposal controls, vote thresholds, execution delays, exchange-held voting power and emergency veto paths. DAOs with large liquid treasuries can be exposed when voting power is cheap enough to acquire, borrow or coordinate ahead of a vote.

The incident follows a wider year of protocol and treasury security pressure, with attackers repeatedly targeting governance, bridges, wallets and liquidity routes rather than only core chains. Large drains have already kept DeFi wallet losses and bridge exploit costs in focus across multiple networks.