TL;DR:
- A manipulator withdrew 4.42 trillion BONK tokens (equivalent to $20 million) from the BonkDAO treasury using the voting system itself.
- The attacker acquired approximately 1% of the total BONK supply on centralized exchanges to secure the necessary quorum.
- Only seven wallets out of a total of 18,500 eligible participated in the controversial BIP #76 governance proposal.
David Schwartz, Ripple co-founder and CTO Emeritus, warned that the principle of “code is law” does not exempt individuals from criminal or civil liability before ordinary courts. This forceful statement comes after it was revealed that the decentralized treasury of BonkDAO, based on the Solana network, recently suffered an exploit that drained at least $20 million.
Everyone who voted for the proposal breached their fiduciary duty to the other holders.
— David 'JoelKatz' Schwartz (@JoelKatz) July 7, 2026
The controversy was triggered by the official approval of proposal BIP #76 on the Realms platform. The event did not correspond to a conventional hack via broken smart contracts, but rather to a deliberate manipulation of the token-weighted voting mechanism. The attacker executed a coordinated strategy by investing nearly $4.4 million on the Binance and Bybit platforms to accumulate around 1% of the total supply of the BONK memecoin.
With this power position, the manipulator’s wallet introduced the proposal to transfer a total of 4.42 trillion tokens to an external address. By depositing the assets just 25 hours before the final closing of the vote, this single actor concentrated 99.9% of the active voting power. The scarce community participation facilitated the maneuver, as barely seven addresses out of the 18,500 enabled took part in the process. As a direct result of the vote, the sender absorbed 5% of the crypto-asset’s circulating supply.
Legal interpretation regarding DeFi structures
The purely technical validity of the transaction within the blockchain does not invalidate the financial damage. The arguments presented by David Schwartz indicate that this type of incident clearly typifies as corporate fraud before state courts. The expert detailed that, under common law, the lack of registration of a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) as a limited liability legal entity (LLC) automatically converts the structure into a general partnership.
In this type of business association, members assume joint and several liability. Data from the shared legal analysis suggest that the voters who actively backed the harmful proposal committed a direct breach of their fiduciary duty to the rest of the token holders. Similarly, Schwartz’s analysis highlights that judicial bodies exclusively evaluate the real economic impact, discarding any type of legal exception for being a meme-category asset.
Currently, BonkDAO representatives have already filed formal notifications with the corresponding law enforcement and security agencies to report the theft of the funds. The development team, in coordination with the Solana Foundation and multiple centralized exchanges, is executing analytical tasks on the blockchain to track the destination of the capital and freeze the addresses associated with the attacker.
Various legal analysts agree that this event represents a turning point against legal nihilism in decentralized finance, transforming blockchain transparency into an evidentiary recording tool for the courts.
