McDonald's, Elon Musk Twitter Exchange Send 'Grimacecoin' Cryptocurrencies Flying

The bull run may be over, but this bear market has already served up a few strange morsels. 

On Tuesday, Tesla CEO and long-time Dogecoin fan Elon Musk tweeted at McDonald’s in an attempt to get the fast-food chain to accept DOGE as payment. McDonald’s responded by saying that it would only make the change if Tesla also accepted a then-non-existent currency called “Grimacecoin.” 

Grimace is a “purple being of indeterminate species” who exists in McDonaldland, the fast-food chain’s cartoonish metaverse, according to internet fandom.  

Shortly after the tweet, tens of cryptocurrencies trading under the name Grimacecoin began appearing (and mooning) on various blockchainsblockchains. 

Dex Screener, a tool that monitors token activity on different decentralized exchanges, revealed that some variety of this token was trading. 

These networks included Binance Smart Chain (BSC), Polygon, Ethereum, Avalanche, and Fantom. 

The biggest gainer of this batch was the Grimacecoin on BSC’s PancakeSwap, which jumped by a whopping 120,000% over the past 24 hours. 

It’s entirely unclear what the purpose of these coins is beyond simply grifting on social media activity between two large Twitter accounts.

McDonald’s and crypto

McDonald’s has been cued into cringe crypto moves for some time now. 

Besides the latest Grimacecoin stunt, it also released an NFT for its legendary McRib sandwich back in October. If chosen for the stunt, “lucky” winners would enjoy a picture of the tantalizing snack as a digital image long after the restaurant chain stopped serving its limited-time-only product. 

Elsewhere, other large brands are also busy square-pegging round holes.

From Visa to Budweiser: Big Brands Are Taking NFTs Seriously

Budweiser has proudly hopped aboard the NFT train, and it's not the only big name doing it this week. The beer giant on Tuesday changed its Twitter profile to a hand-drawn beer rocket NFT that it bought for 8 ETH (about $26,000), and it also registered an Ethereum domain name, beer.eth, for 30 ETH (nearly $100,000). The NFT was designed by artist Tom Sachs as part of the Rocket Factory NFT series. Budweiser is just the latest household name over the past few days to signal its adoption of NFTs,...

Taco Bell, a similar fast-food restaurant that swaps buns for tacos shells, launched a collection of NFT-based digital tacos. Absurd? The collection quickly sold out. 

Even amid the exchange between Musk and McDonald’s, Burger King tweeted “only a king knows what da coin do,” suggesting its social media manager may have been having a stroke. 

Still, today’s launch of Grimacecoin is yet more evidence that no matter how dumb you think a certain coin might be, there’s a buyer out there somewhere.