BONK Founder Nom: Wants BONK to become a product that "doesn't feel like Crypto"

There’s a Crypto project you can recognize at a glance.

The website homepage is packed with jargon. Connecting your wallet takes five steps, and behind every feature is a new learning curve. Users aren’t using a product—they’re going through a test. You can feel it saying, “This is professional stuff. If you don’t understand it, you’re not suitable for this.”

What Nom wants to do is exactly the opposite kind of thing.

“If users don’t use a product, the problem isn’t the users. The problem is that the product experience isn’t good enough, or it hasn’t been explained clearly.”

This is a line that Nom, BONK’s core contributor, said in a public interview. It doesn’t sound that surprising, but in the Crypto industry, teams that can truly treat this as a product principle and actually carry it out are few and far between.

Who is he?

In an industry where most core figures at Crypto projects deliberately keep a veil of mystery, Nom is one of the few who are willing to show up publicly.

He’s been deeply involved in the Solana ecosystem for more than three years and is a co-founder of MonkeDAO—one of the earliest community DAOs on Solana, built around the Solana Monkey Business NFT series, with a community of developers and holders. He’s also a co-founder of Moonwalk, a fitness app that combines workout goals with on-chain staking.

He’s seen Solana at its ugliest. At the end of 2022, FTX collapsed, and liquidity across the entire ecosystem nearly evaporated overnight. Large numbers of developers left, and countless articles outside declared, “Solana is dead.” It was at that moment that he and a group of developers who were still staying here decided to do something.

That “something” was BONK.

A shot of confidence

On December 25, 2022, BONK officially launched. 50% of the total supply was distributed to the Solana community via airdrop: NFT holders, developers, and DeFi users. There was no private sale, no VC allocation, no carefully designed token unlock curve, and no large chunk of funds left for the team.

Later, Nom described this airdrop as “a shot of confidence Solana needed.”

That phrasing is accurate—it doesn’t cure the root problem, but it gives a community in the depths of despair, about to lose faith, a reason to keep believing there’s still something worth staying for.

The airdrop itself was also a practice of fair distribution, and a direct rebuttal to the “low liquidity, high FDV” token model that was widespread across the industry at the time. Giving 50% of the tokens to the community is a choice—and a stance.

What does “not like Crypto” mean?

Three years later, Nom’s expectations for BONK had shifted from “community signal” to something more concrete: a set of “products that are not like Crypto.”

This phrase needs clarification, because it’s very easy to misunderstand.

“Not like Crypto” doesn’t mean escaping the industry. It doesn’t mean hiding the existence of the blockchain. And it doesn’t mean compromising with mainstream markets. What it refers to is a more specific idea: blockchain should disappear from users’ experience, becoming invisible layer-0 infrastructure rather than something users have to actively learn and deal with.

What does the ideal look like?

A user opens BONKfun to send a token, and what they feel is, “I’m doing something creative,” not, “I’m deploying a smart contract.” A user uses JUNK.fun to clean their wallet, and what they feel is, “I turned useless things into useful ones,” not, “I’m destroying SPL accounts to reclaim rent.” In Bonk Arena, when a player defeats opponents and earns $BONK, what they experience is the win or loss of the game, with the blockchain settlement quietly completed in the background.

Even “exercise” has BONK tried to productize. Moonwalk Fitness lets users stake BONK to set step goals: if they meet the goal, they get their money back; if they don’t, the money goes to the winner. The motivation comes from the pressure of self-discipline, not from understanding on-chain mechanisms.

“Not like Crypto” is about moving blockchain out of the user’s line of sight—so users perceive the product’s value, while blockchain things happen on their own in the background.

The concrete expression of product philosophy in the ecosystem

This philosophy doesn’t stop at the level of ideas. Once you place it across BONK’s entire product matrix, you can see its shadow in every product decision.

BONKfun lowers the barrier for launching tokens to nearly zero—no code, no approval, no need to understand underlying protocols. Anyone with an idea can launch. This “anyone” is literally anyone, not “anyone who understands Crypto.”

BONK.live filters for high-quality projects, so community members don’t have to do tedious due diligence themselves. Instead, the platform takes on part of the responsibility for information vetting, protecting ordinary users. This is also a way of “lowering the barrier”—not the technical barrier, but the cognitive barrier.

JUNK.fun solves a pain point that long-time on-chain users commonly have. It wraps an otherwise very dull on-chain action in a gamified experience. Users are playing while using blockchain—maybe they don’t even need to realize it.

From Meme origins to the endgame of “not like Crypto”

BONK’s origin, no matter how you retell it, is a community experiment full of gag-and-meme culture. Christmas, Dogecoin, airdrops—its very beginnings are a Meme.

But Nom clearly isn’t planning to let it stay there.

Recently, he publicly increased his holdings of Bonk Inc. (Nasdaq ticker: BNKK) and clearly stated that there is a huge mismatch between the current stock price and the company’s actual business value. This isn’t something said by someone who only cares about “community sentiment.” It’s something said by someone who is seriously running a company.

The BONK ecosystem now has more than 1.1 million holders, spread across 13 chains, listed on 55+ exchanges, and integrated with 400+ ecosystem projects. At the institutional level, there’s Bonk Inc., which is listed on Nasdaq; Osprey BONK Trust, listed on OTCQX; and Bitcoin Capital BONK ETP, listed on the Swiss SIX exchange.

All of these are not the level of infrastructure density a “Meme coin” should have.

But what Nom cares about most may not be these institutional products, nor the quarterly revenue of $10M +, but this: whether the next ordinary user—someone who has never touched an on-chain product—can naturally begin using products in the BONK ecosystem without learning anything.

If that happens, it will truly be the day when “not like Crypto” becomes real in practice.