$ANSEM, Robinhood Chain, & Why SOL Still Beats ETH in 2026 | Mike Dudas

**David Hoffman** (0:02)
Bankless Nation, I'm joined by Mike Dudas from 6 Man Adventures. Mike, welcome to the podcast.

**Mike Dudas** (0:08)
Thank you. Great to be here. I appreciate it.

**David Hoffman** (0:10)
Mike, we've never had you on the podcast before, but we have been around each other since the very beginning of crypto. It's good to have you on.

**Mike Dudas** (0:17)
Yeah. No, I'm delighted. I've read tons of what you've written. We interact on Twitter and real life, and obviously listen to a ton of your podcasts. So I really appreciate it.

**David Hoffman** (0:27)
So the current event of the day is once again, Memecoins and the Trenches.
That's just been a seemingly an inevitable component of the crypto industry and it never seems to be resolved as a topic of conversation. You have a particular perspective, I think, that I want to get it here on the episode today. Maybe we can go back to the era of Bonk, because that is what I remember, your first actual involvement in the Memecoin Trench era. Then we can talk about what's going on with Robinhood Chain and the Ansem Memecoin and what that industry, and the debate around Base and everything. But I want to get your perspective around the role that Bonk, the Memecoin on Solana played for Solana back when it was launched, and kind of like what your thoughts or like strategy or just overall like perspective was around like Memecoins on Solana back before Memecoins were really as big as this thing as they are today.

**Mike Dudas** (1:26)
Yeah, absolutely. So Memecoins today, I think people look at them and think of them as this like big, you know, professional industrial complex. And to some extent, you know, that's quite true. The same time, you know, the Memecoins that have the most significant amount of value tend to be outliers and don't really fit that mold of kind of like the cynical short-term, you know, pump and eventually go down rapidly type thing. So, you know, there's different types of Memecoins, just like there's different types of VC backed tokens. But anyway, the history of Memecoins is either one of the earliest primitives in crypto and Dogecoin is like, I believe more than a decade old and Shiba Inu. And so you've had Dogecoin is its own chain.
Shiba Inu is an Ethereum Memecoin. And these are still today worth billions of dollars. So Memecoins and this idea of, you know, call it IP community, you know, however you want to describe these people sort of having fun around something that doesn't have really tangible value is something that has lasting interest to humans and clearly lasting value. So then fast forwarding to your question on Bonk, you know, at the sort of depths of the Solana bear market, so post FTX, you know, post all the other things that went wrong in all of crypto, end of 2022, you know, the mood, the market participants, you know, in the Solana ecosystem. So the mood was low. The number of market participants had dropped dramatically. And frankly, the number of creators, so developers, I mean, there was a meme at the time, a joke that there were something like 75 developers left in Solana. And, you know, a group of folks who cared a lot about a Solana, who had participated, who had built things, you know, not just, you know, finance people or VCs or, you know, enthusiasts or collectors, but developers and other people who were pretty deep in the Solana ecosystem said, hey, what's a really good way at a time of like low morale and activity to get people, get the chain reinvigorated, get activity back on the chain. Hey, why don't we reward the folks who have been using the chain, building on it, and doing things for the past four or five years? Again, this was late 2022, I guess not four or five years, but who had been doing things for the past three years.
So a group of 20 folks launched Memecoin called Bonk, a dog coin. Again, this is before the Meme industrial complex erupted. The idea was if we airdrop half of the supply to folks who have built on the chain, used the chain, collected NFTs and other things on the chain. One, we're going to have a bit of a stimulus activity, hopefully get some excitement, attention, and get people interested in building again. Again, this is the stone cold bottom. I think SOL was at that point close to 10 bucks.
Lo and behold, it worked. So basically, airdrop 50% of supply within, I think, a month or six weeks, the token was trading over 400 million. And so a couple hundred million in value had been airdropped at a time when that just wasn't a thing for Memecoins out to the Solana community. And developers, some of them got, I think, $10,000 plus at a time when their products were struggling. And many people were grateful, and it just led to a lot of goodwill. Over the next six months, Bonk sort of trended down into the summer.