BonkDAO has disclosed that attackers have drained roughly $20 million worth of BONK tokens from its treasury after exploiting a malicious governance proposal.

According to a statement published by BonkDAO on X, the unauthorized proposal allowed an unknown entity to remove approximately $20 million in BONK from the project’s treasury on the Solana blockchain.

The DAO said it has reported the incident to law enforcement and is working to recover the stolen assets while helping identify those responsible.

The disclosure quickly weighed on market sentiment. Bonk (BONK) fell about 8.5% over the following 24 hours to trade at $0.0000044 as investors reacted to the treasury breach. The incident also adds to a growing list of governance and smart contract attacks that have affected decentralized finance projects in recent months.

What happened during the BonkDAO treasury attack?

BonkDAO attributed the loss to what it described as a “malicious governance proposal,” though it did not release technical details explaining how the proposal passed or how the treasury controls were bypassed. The organization said additional information would be shared as its investigation progresses.

Launched in December 2022, BONK became one of Solana’s best-known memecoins after its developers distributed half of the token’s total supply through an airdrop. Alongside Dogecoin, Shiba Inu and Pepe, the token remains among the most recognized assets in the memecoin sector.

Market data shows the sector has already been under pressure before the attack. CoinMarketCap data indicates the combined market value of leading memecoins, including DOGE, SHIB and PEPE, dropped to roughly $22 billion last week before recovering above $26 billion in July.

Even after that rebound, the category stood at about $25.3 billion at publication, down more than 54% over the previous 12 months, according to CoinMarketCap.

Why are governance and DeFi attacks drawing renewed attention?

Recent security incidents suggest attackers continue to target decentralized protocols through different methods. In May, memecoin launch platform DxSale disclosed that it lost about $7.3 million in tokens after a cyberattack affecting liquidity providers on BNB Chain.

Although blockchain investigators identified the attacker’s wallet, one security expert said the infrastructure used to move the stolen funds could make tracing and recovery more difficult.

A separate incident has also unfolded in decentralized finance. Security company Blockaid recently said its exploit detection system identified an active attack targeting Summer.fi, a DeFi yield aggregation and automated vault management platform.

According to Blockaid, roughly $6 million had already been drained when it issued its alert, though neither the firm nor Summer.fi had released a complete technical explanation at the time.

Crypto.news also previously reported another Blockaid alert involving a smart contract exploit affecting ShapeShift’s FOX Colony on Arbitrum, highlighting how security firms can detect active attacks before full forensic reports become available.

The BonkDAO breach also comes as scrutiny of memecoin projects has intensified. Earlier, crypto.news reported that blockchain analytics firm Nansen estimated around one million investors in U.S. President Donald Trump’s Official Trump (TRUMP) memecoin had collectively lost about $3.8 million as of June 30.

The report was published days after the president disclosed earning more than $1.4 billion from crypto-related businesses, including approximately $635 million linked to memecoin projects.

American Bitcoin Corp. said its Bitcoin reserve has moved above 8,000 BTC after its latest treasury update. 

In a July 6 post on X, the company said its Bitcoin reserve has grown more than threefold since its Nasdaq debut, while its satoshis-per-share metric has also grown nearly threefold.

BitcoinTreasuries data showed American Bitcoin holding 8,000 BTC, worth about $512 million, among publicly traded Bitcoin treasury companies. The same tracker ranked the company near the top tier of public corporate BTC holders, ahead of GD Culture Group and Galaxy Digital in the U.S. list.

ABTC stock rises after reverse split

ABTC traded at $8.49 at the time of writing, up 14.1% on the day, according to Google Finance data. The stock opened at $7.98, touched an intraday high of $9.31, and fell as low as $7.40, with volume above 2.17 million shares.

The move followed American Bitcoin’s 1-for-15 reverse stock split. The company said the split became effective at 5:00 p.m. on July 2, with Class A shares set to trade on a split-adjusted basis on Nasdaq from July 6 under the same ABTC ticker.

American Bitcoin said the split would reduce issued shares from about 1.09 billion to roughly 73 million. The company said the action was mainly meant to lift the per-share price and help maintain compliance with Nasdaq’s minimum bid price rule.

Mining output supports treasury growth

As previously reported by crypto.news, American Bitcoin posted an $81.8 million net loss in the first quarter of 2026. The loss came as Bitcoin fell 22% during the quarter, which led to a $117.2 million non-cash charge on the company’s digital asset holdings.

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The company still mined 817 BTC in the quarter and cut its cost per Bitcoin to $36,200. That was down 23% from $46,900 in the fourth quarter of 2025. American Bitcoin also bought 803 BTC during the quarter, taking its holdings to 7,021 BTC as of March 31.

CEO Mike Ho defended the operating result at the time. “The underlying business was profitable and we did not sell a single coin,” he said, referring to the company’s mark-to-market charge.

Hut 8 link remains central to ABTC strategy

American Bitcoin was launched by Hut 8 and Eric Trump in March 2025. Hut 8 said at the time that the company aimed to build a large pure-play Bitcoin miner while developing a strategic Bitcoin reserve.

As previously reported by crypto.news, American Bitcoin is backed by Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. The company has built its model around self-mining and treasury accumulation, rather than shifting away from mining toward artificial-intelligence data centers.

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The latest treasury update shows that American Bitcoin continues to add BTC despite pressure on its share price earlier this year. The company’s stock rebound after the reverse split gives ABTC a higher trading price, but its performance still remains tied to Bitcoin prices, mining costs, and investor demand for public Bitcoin treasury firms.

Former Tether chief investment officer Richard Heathcote is seeking to sell part of his 1.26% stake in the stablecoin issuer, according to a Bloomberg report. 

The report said Heathcote is working with PJT Partners and has started talks with potential buyers.

The planned transaction covers only part of his holding, not the full stake. Bloomberg did not report a valuation for the sale. A completed deal could offer a rare public marker for Tether’s private shares, because the company does not trade on a public exchange.

The report comes after Tether became one of crypto’s largest private companies by revenue and reserves. Any private stake sale may draw attention from investors who want exposure to stablecoin growth without buying shares in a listed company.

Tether remains privately held

Heathcote stepped back from daily duties in March, when Tether named Zachary Lyons as chief investment officer. Tether said Heathcote would stay connected to the company in a non-executive advisory role after helping guide its reserve management and investment strategy.

Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino has pushed back against public-listing talk. In an April 2025 post on X, he said, “Tether doesn’t need to go public.” The comment remains relevant as the reported Heathcote sale comes through a private process rather than an IPO.

• Volume ran 16.19% above the seven-day average, enough to show participation but not enough to confirm a clean breakout.

• The sharpest activity came near the session low around $1.1110, when volume reached 106.5 million XRP, about 129% above the 24-hour average.

• Buyers later pushed XRP toward $1.1507, but the move failed to hold near the upper end of the range.

Technical Analysis

• The key development is that XRP defended the $1.11 area, but failed to turn the rebound into a sustained move above $1.13-$1.14.

• The earlier breakout above $1.08 remains intact, but the next leg higher needs stronger volume through resistance.

• The rejection near $1.1507 shows sellers are still active around the same zone that capped recent recovery attempts.

• The hourly structure weakened after XRP failed near $1.1308 and slipped back toward $1.1249, leaving a lower-high pattern intraday.

• XRP remains in a consolidation phase between support near $1.11 and resistance near $1.14-$1.15.

What traders should watch

• $1.1110 is the key downside level after buyers defended it during the session.

• $1.1249-$1.1270 is the immediate support zone after the latest intraday pullback.

• $1.1308-$1.1325 is the first resistance area bulls need to reclaim.

• $1.14-$1.15 remains the bigger test after repeated failures near that zone.

The Trump administration’s plan for a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve has run into legal and agency questions.

Bloomberg reported that officials are still deciding which department can hold and manage the government’s Bitcoin.

The issue centers on whether the Treasury has clear legal authority to control a volatile digital asset as a federal reserve asset. The Commerce Department has also emerged as a possible home for the reserve, while the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel works with both agencies on a lawful structure. The review keeps the plan active, but it also shows that control of the reserve remains unsettled.

Treasury role faces legal review

Trump’s March 2025 executive order said the Treasury secretary should create an office to manage the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve. The order said the reserve would hold BTC forfeited through criminal or civil proceedings, including assets already controlled by federal agencies.

The order also said government BTC placed in the reserve should not be sold and should be kept as reserve assets. Still, the same order required Treasury to review legal and investment issues, including where the accounts should sit and whether new legislation was needed to operate the reserve.

White House says structure is still under review

A White House spokesperson told CoinDesk that the administration continues to evaluate the best structure for the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and the U.S. Digital Asset Stockpile. 

“To deliver on the president’s vision, the Trump administration continues to evaluate the best structure,” Liz Huston said.

As previously reported by crypto.news, White House crypto adviser Patrick Witt said in May that officials had made progress on legal and custody safeguards. He called the work a “breakthrough” and said an announcement was expected in the coming weeks, though the latest report shows that the structure remains under review.

Congress and custody remain key questions

The latest report shows that the reserve still depends on more than a presidential order. As previously reported by crypto.news, the U.S. already has a Bitcoin reserve on paper, but the main question is whether it can become a working program with clear custody and purchase rules.

Lawmakers have also tried to turn the reserve into law. crypto.news previously reported that the American Reserve Modernization Act would create a Treasury-run Bitcoin reserve, require a 20-year holding rule, and call for audits, proof-of-reserve reports, and reviews of budget-neutral purchase methods. No federal bill has completed passage, leaving executive agencies to solve the custody issue for now. 

BitcoinTreasuries data showed the U.S. government holding 328,372 BTC, worth about $20.7 billion as of July 7. The tracker ranks the U.S. as the largest known government holder of Bitcoin, ahead of China, the United Kingdom, Ukraine, and El Salvador.

That large holding gives the reserve plan weight, but the new legal review shows the structure is not settled. 

For now, the debate is not about buying more Bitcoin. It is about who can legally control seized BTC, how federal agencies should store it, and what rules should govern a reserve built from forfeited assets.

TeraWulf began as a bitcoin miner, running warehouses of specialized computers to earn newly issued coins, a business whose margins tightened after last year’s halving cut the mining reward in half.

Like several of its peers, it has pointed its power capacity and sites at hosting AI computing instead, where a single tenant on a long lease offers steadier income than the volatile economics of mining. The company still runs a bitcoin operation, but the Anthropic lease and its wider pipeline may now define its value.

Meanwhile, TeraWulf added it will sell its entire 50.1% stake in the Abernathy data-center joint venture in Texas to a group led by its partner Fluidstack for about $530 million, monetizing roughly $450 million of invested capital at a premium and freeing cash to expand data centers it owns outright.

The deal fits a rotation CoinDesk has tracked all year. As of March 2026, Bitcoin miners sold more than 15,000 coins from peak holdings and signed over $70 billion in AI computing contracts, chasing the steadier margins of the AI trade, the same shift of capital toward artificial intelligence that has pulled money out of crypto through a losing first half.

The lift stood out against a soft day for bitcoin itself. The token slipped toward $61,900 on Monday after Strategy disclosed the sale of 3,588 bitcoin for about $216 million, a sharp step up from the 32 coins it sold weeks ago.

“The institutional bid has all but vanished,” said Yusuf Fakhro, partner at ARP Digital, pointing to CME futures open interest at a 32-month low and a term structure at its tightest since early 2023.

He added that six-month options skew, a measure of how much traders pay to protect against a drop, has spiked to its fourth-highest on record, with the only parallels in June and November 2022, both of which came near major cycle bottoms.

When downside insurance gets this expensive, he said, the market is paying up for protection just as the worst may already be priced in.

Oil re-entered the picture overnight. Brent crude rose 0.6% to about $72.45 a barrel after a laden liquefied natural gas carrier was struck by a projectile near the Omani coast as it left the Strait of Hormuz, according to Bloomberg, a fresh attack that tests the peace deal reached in late June.

Energy shocks tied to the Iran conflict drove crypto’s selling earlier this year before the truce eased them, and a renewed flare-up is the kind of macro risk that had faded from the market’s view.

Elsewhere, Asian shares fell as technology stocks came under renewed selling, with South Korea’s Kospi down 6.7%, according to Bloomberg. Samsung Electronics slid 8.3% even after quarterly profit surged, and SK Hynix fell the same as it began marketing a U.S. listing. U.S. futures pointed lower, suggesting Monday’s Wall Street rebound may not carry.

US President Donald Trump says he got involved in crypto “for politics” and became pro-crypto after seeing how much money the industry was making.

At a press conference in the Oval Office on Monday to announce “Trump Accounts,” an investment account for children under 18, Trump was asked whether the accounts would allow for Bitcoin (BTC).

“I’ve become a big crypto guy only for one reason: If we don’t have it, China’s going to have it,” Trump answered. “I’m a fan, I wasn’t initially, I didn’t know much about it, but, for some of my first term, I wasn’t much involved, and I watched it grow, and it’s a huge industry.”

“I got involved in it a little bit for politics,” Trump added. “I realized there are a lot of people that love crypto.”

The comments shed new light on why Trump pivoted his stance towards crypto. In his first term, Trump said he was “not a fan” of crypto and called Bitcoin “a scam.” Since then, he and his family have built deep business interests in crypto, and Trump has faced criticism for his pro-crypto stance while being connected to the industry.

“As a businessman, I see a lot of money starting to come in with Bitcoin and, you know, the different forms, and I said: ‘This thing’s got a lot of life,’ and then I hear China was going to make a heavy move on it,” he added. “If we didn’t do it, China would do it.”

Trump’s pro-crypto pivot attracted the help of the crypto lobby, which spent around $170 million in the 2024 election to help elect mostly Republicans, and is set to spend even more backing pro-crypto candidates in the November midterms.

Donald Trump speaks to reporters about “Trump Accounts” at the White House on Monday. Source: YouTube

Trump says he doesn’t talk to family about crypto interests

Trump said he doesn’t talk to his family about their involvement in crypto, an area that made him more than $1.4 billion last year, according to financial disclosures released June 30.

Trump and his sons are listed as co-founders of World Liberty Financial, a crypto platform that generated a large portion of Trump’s crypto-related income last year, but the president said his interest in crypto is “not a question of a personal thing.”

Related: Donald Trump says ‘nothing wrong’ with $1.4B crypto windfall while in office

“I let my kids do whatever the hell they do. I don’t talk to them, ever, talk to them about it,” Trump said.

Trump claimed that the Biden administration “dropped all investigations” related to crypto when he “went very pro-crypto.” 

However, under the Trump administration, the Securities and Exchange Commission stopped multiple investigations and withdrew or settled enforcement actions filed against crypto companies, some of which had donated to Trump.

“Every time I see a crypto guy where they dropped an investigation, I said: ‘You’re lucky I’m president,” Trump said.

Magazine: SBF will never get a pardon, Trump peace deal boosts Bitcoin: Hodlers Digest

The United Nations Development Programme has expanded its partnership with the Stellar Development Foundation after blockchain payment pilots cut aid distribution costs from 10% to 2% and kept payments running during network outages.

The United Nations Development Programme announced Monday that it has signed a new agreement with the Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) following 16 months of blockchain payment pilots across multiple countries.