A short exchange between Elon Musk and McDonald’s on Twitter spurred the creation of nearly 10 GrimaceCoins on the Binance Smart Chain (BSC) network alone.
On Tuesday, January 25, Elon Musk tweeted calling on McDonald’s to start accepting Dogecoin as payment. The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX promised to eat a Happy Meal on TV for it.
McDonald’s Twitter account on Wednesday night responded to Elon Musk’s offer with a counteroffer — the restaurant chain would accept payment in DOGE tokens if Tesla began accepting payment in GrimaceCoins, which did not exist at the time the tweet was published.
Nearly a dozen different “Grimacecoins” were created on the Binance Smart Chain network a few hours later. The creation of such “shitcoins” is facilitated by the relative simplicity of the process and the ability to trade them on decentralized exchanges, backed by minimal liquidity.
The price of one such token rose more than 285.000% in a few hours, CoinDesk reported. At its peak, the coin had a capitalization of $2 million and a liquidity pool of $65.000. A similar token was also created on the Ethereum blockchain and rose more than 56.000% within a few hours of launch. By that time, it had been bought by over 1.000 users and had a market cap of over $6 million.
Grimace is a purple character from a 1970s McDonald’s commercial who acted as an anti-hero by stealing the restaurant’s young customers’ milkshakes. The chain eventually dropped the use of the character because he scared kids too much.
