Elon Musk’s Twitter feed is well-known for pumping dumb cryptocurrencies, but a series of crypto tokens named after McDonald’s mascot ‘Grimace’ might be the most pointless yet.
In the latest iteration of Musk’s support for Dogecoin, the maverick billionaire said he’d eat a Happy Meal on television if McDonald’s would just accept his favorite dog money as payment.
McDonald’s retorted that it would accept Dogecoin when Tesla accepts “GrimaceCoin,” which at the time was a joke as it didn’t yet exist.
The seemingly innocuous McDonald’s tweet lightheartedly refers one of McDonald’s classic mascots, the goofy purple taste bud Grimace (yep, it’s a taste bud).
But perhaps what the fast food giant’s social media guru didn’t realize is that it’d given a hypothetical McDonald’s-themed crypto free real estate.
Shortly after the tweet was sent to 4.4 million McDonald’s followers, someone created an unlicensed Twitter account and website for “GrimaceCoin.”
Cascading Grimace-themed crypto degeneracy
An unofficial GrimaceCoin was quickly listed on Binance Smart Chain-powered PancakeSwap, with a GRIMACE-to-Wrapped Binance Coin trading pair.
GRIMACE started trading at a fraction of a penny worth of BNB and spiked to near $2 worth of Binance’s native token within hours. GrimaceCoin is currently trading at almost $4.20.
DexScreener reports more than $3.4 million in GRIMACE volume overall.
Meanwhile, a different Grimace-themed token — “Grimace Coin” issued on Ethereum under GRIM — was finding speculators on decentralized exchanges Uniswap and SushiSwap.
Protos pulled Etherscan data and found traders had exchanged 1,628 ETH ($4 million) worth of GRIM so far.
An overwhelming majority of that volume came from Grimace Coin sellers. It’s more than likely most of those dumps were the token’s issuers.
- GRIM opened trade at 0 ETH and hit a peak of 0.00000323 ETH ($0.00785213) shortly after.
- Buyers have accounted for only 7% of GRIM’s volume so far, equivalent to 120 ETH ($291,000).
- The largest individual sales equaled more than 11 ETH ($36,600).
Read more: [Measuring how much Elon Musk pumps crypto like Shiba Inu, Floki, Doge]
McDonald’s kept up the crypto pandering
McDonald’s later tweeted, “how are you doing people who run crypto Twitter accounts.” It then pinned that tweet on its timeline.
This certainly did not discourage speculative Grimace-themed trade across the various decentralized exchanges.
McDonald’s even triple-downed, tweeting, “Grimace is a close personal friend of mine.”
However, Dogecoin co-creator Billy Markus labeled the fast food giant’s Grimace crypto joke “cringe” due to its ability to pump obscure digital assets.
“In other real talk, [McDonald’s] will be picked up by the media, mentioning [GrimaceCoin] and how it exists now (it does — multiple anon grifters made it), and how it ‘went up 1000%!’ because clickbait, while hurting the goodwill of the [Doge] community and losing people money,” said Markus.
In fact, at least one McDonald’s competitor joined the mayhem.
Upholding the tradition of humorous banter between competing fast-food chains’ Twitter accounts, Burger King replied to Musk and McDonald’s, implying that it might be willing to consider Dogecoin.
But mostly, it looks like Burger King is simping for Musk.
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