On Monday, Solana-based memecoin project BONK DAO lost $20 million to a novel kind of attack: governance. Instead of hacking a smart contract, the attacker here voted to take the treasury. Using next-gen features in Chainalysis Reactor, our investigators mapped the on-chain events that preceded the heist.

Key insights include:

• The attack began on June 30 when an anonymous wallet proposed draining BONK's treasury. To pass, the proposal needed 1% of BONK's supply voting YES. On July 4 and 5, a separate wallet acquired exactly that, spending $8 million via exchange purchases and DeFi borrowing.
• On July 6, the proposal passed, triggering the drain of the $20 million treasury. Nine hours later, the exploiter moved $188,000 to an exchange and transferred the remaining $19 million to a multisig wallet where the funds still sit.
• The multisig is controlled by "BONK 2.0," a new DAO created by the malicious voter and governed by three entities: the malicious voter, the exploiter wallet, and a third wallet with financial ties to the voter.
• Just over an hour after draining the treasury, the voter began liquidating $5.3 million in purchased BONK, signaling that the attacker had no intention of holding the tokens acquired to execute the heist.

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