McDonalds’ Stupid Meme Coin Joke With Elon Musk Led To Possible Crypto Scams

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Ronald McDonald and Grimace participate in the 94th Annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on November 24, 2020 in New York City.

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Grimace, the purple blob character in the McDonalds ad, is a complicated guy. When he first appeared in 1971, he played the villain, a stolen milkshake often clutched in each of his four arms. The company called him Evil Grimace. But as Grimace discovered, it’s hard to make crime pay forever. About a decade later, McDonalds redesigned him quite significantly, cut his arms in half, removed the epithet from his name, and turned him into Ronald McDonald’s stupid sidekick.

Unfortunately for Grimace, his legacy became even more complex after a strange whirlwind of events on Tuesday. Over the past day, more than half a dozen meme pieces using the name and image of Grimaces have been minted and then circulated widely on social media, primarily on Twitter and Discord. Despite the broader price drop among established cryptocurrencies, Grimace Coins attracted nearly $1 million in collective market value within hours. Like most meme pieces, the creators of Grimace Pieces are anonymous. And like all meme coins, they have no intrinsic value and their owners have limited protections. In the past, meme plays have been the source of scams. (Remember the recent Squid Coin scam?) The crypto leader’s accidental rise in grimaces as the cautionary final chapter in the ongoing tragicomedy surrounding cryptocurrency, a very promising technology, primarily as the best digital record keeping system, but it’s also a popular tool for criminals, which ends up making anything crypto shady by association.

Trading things like Grimaces is like playing with each other, says Billy Markus, the software engineer who created the very first meme coin, dogecoin, in 2013. In casino, Markus describes, Most lose, some win , he says, and the game is usually rigged.

To back some up, it all started on Tuesday morning when Elon Musk tweeted at Grimaces’ parent company offering to eat a Happy Meal on live TV if McDonalds started accepting dogecoin. (Okay, let’s back it up even further: Musk is a longtime supporter of dogecoin. He mentioned it while appearing on Saturday Night Live last May and has continued to publicly tout the cryptocurrency on Twitter, even though it’s down almost 80% from its all-time high last spring. .)

The offering of musks at McDonalds may seem unexpected. It really shouldn’t. He loves stirring the pot of the internet, sparking conversations about things he supposedly likes and a lot of other people don’t. The other thing is that it wouldn’t be crazy for McDonalds to embrace it and capitalize on a viral marketing moment that costs nothing. An ever growing list of big banner companies Microsoft, PayPal, Starbucks, AT&T, Overstock.com, Twitch, Twitter, Crate and Barrel, Nordstrom and so on accept some form of cryptocurrency payment. Why not McDonalds too, especially if he could make a TV spot out of it with the richest person in the world?

McDonalds decided not to accept Musk’s proposal or tell him to push it. What he did was worse. On Tuesday night, he tweeted this to Musk:

Obviously it was a joke, even if it didn’t match the energy of the original Musks at all. The fast food giant has no plans to launch its own cryptocurrency. But the company just as clearly hasn’t given much thought to what might happen next. Even though the result was obvious to many other people:

Shortly after McDonalds’ tweet to Musk, some crypto enthusiasts decided to take advantage of the companies’ limping back and possibly get rich in the process. They’ve created real grimace meme coins, established on the Ethereum and Binance Smart Contract blockchains and traded on crypto exchanges like QuickSwap and PancakeSwap, popular places for the newest and riskiest issues that might not end up on mainstream venues such as CoinBase.

A bunch of people had the same idea at once, so there are a lot of different Grimace meme pieces available right now. One of the biggest already has a market value of nearly $300,000; he has his own Discord group, where the putative creator of the coins anonymously called himself BigDGrimace and created an image of Grimace dressed as a pimp as his profile picture. (Unfortunately, BigDGrimace declined to comment for this story.) To keep things moving, he implored his followers on Discord and Twitter to market the piece more. Want to help keep the pump in good condition? BigDGrimace asks in a note to its investors posted on Discord, referencing the coin price increase. Keep searching grimacecoin on twitter search and spread the good gospel of Grimacecoin to those who have yet to experience salvation.

Since it’s literally the first day, it’s impossible to know what’s going on with the Grimace coins. Perhaps their founders operated with the purest of intentions, content to create the latest collectibles on the internet and nothing more. Corn . . . cryptocurrencies with anonymous monitoring, overnight investor interest, and zero fundamental financial value are perfect tools for scammers, an opportunity for someone to start a cryptocurrency and then terminate in a way unexpected impact on the project and get out of it one way or another with the funds invested. In the world of crypto, such a scam is so commonplace that it has a name: the carpet puller. Chainanalysis, a startup that monitors cryptocurrency trading, counted nearly 25 such incidents last year, up from around 10 a year earlier. Carpet pullers got away with nearly $3 billion in 2021, nearly triple the haul of 2020.

The rug pull we’re all most familiar with probably involved the aforementioned Squid Coin. It debuted shortly after Netflixs Squid Game series and quickly went from less than $1 a play to $2,860. Within weeks, the creator of Squid Coin abruptly shut down the cryptocurrency and walked away with $3.3 million.

Many investors in Squid and Grimace coins believe that if they can get in early enough, they can win the pump and dump game and get rid of it before someone else does, says Markus, the creator of the dogecoin. It draws a number of distinctions between dogecoin and these same misused coins. The most obvious: Unlike the people behind these coins, DogeCoin was not invented to steal anyone’s money. Markus just wanted to have fun online. He didn’t get rich. Two years after starting dogecoin, he sold his share of the cryptocurrency and bought a used Honda Civic.

The real takeaway from Grimace Coins is that not everyone can or should treat the web as lightly as Markus, who was just a random dude before creating his meme coin, not a multinational chain of $190 billion burgers with 4.4 million Twitter followers.

What started as a misguided attempt by McDonalds to take back Musk has led to a huge fraud opportunity with thousands of investors piling into financial assets that didn’t exist 20 hours ago. It’s an outcome that companies like McDonalds should probably think about before frolicking around CryptoLand, a place without a lot of rules, except that there, wealth really does materialize out of thin air and clumsy institutions at the old like McDonalds and Grimace deserve milkshakes knocked out of their foursorry, two hands.

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