Upbit Announces Removal of BONK on September 7 Due to Security Concerns, Following Governance Attack on BonkDAO
South Korea's largest cryptocurrency exchange Upbit has officially announced that it will completely delist and terminate BONK trading on September 7, citing serious concerns over security and significant delays in operations and information disclosure.
Previously, BonkDAO suffered a governance attack: the attacker spent approximately $4.4 million to acquire about 1% of the tokens to meet the voting threshold, submitting a proposal to transfer 44 trillion BONK (approximately $20 million) to their own wallet, which was approved by just seven addresses and automatically executed by the smart contract.
Funds and liquidity have been withdrawn from the problematic token, exposing governance vulnerabilities under the event-driven circumstances, benefiting projects that strengthen voting thresholds and activity, while low-participation DAOs and related tokens are under pressure.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
BONK, as a mainstream meme coin in the Solana ecosystem, employs token-weighted voting in its DAO. The attacker purchased just enough tokens through the exchange to meet the 1% legal threshold, exploiting the low voter turnout (only 7 participants out of over 18,000 addresses) to legitimize the malicious proposal, achieving "governance as attack".
Resources are shifting from open low-threshold governance to increasing legal thresholds, time locks, and multi-signature protections, motivated by the need to prevent capital from acquiring voting rights for self-withdrawals, while forcing the community to genuinely participate rather than engage in formal autonomy.
This mirrors historical cases of governance attacks or treasury losses due to low participation in other DAOs; currently, meme coins are transitioning from narrative-driven to governance security calibration, revealing real vulnerabilities in the idealistic autonomy of the industry.
Essentially, this represents a transfer of pricing power: governance rights, once priced by short-term capital, shift treasury assets from community ownership to private ownership by attackers. The mechanism operates under the premise that when the cost of voting is lower than the benefits and participation is extremely low, "autonomy" degenerates into a purchasable ATM.
ABAB News · Law of Cognition
Low-participation governance is just a self-service ATM.
When voting rights can be temporarily acquired by capital, the treasury becomes the target.
The premise of autonomy is that there are indeed people governing.