A flurry of fake Grimacecoins has appeared on the Binance Smart Chain and Ethereum networks shortly after McDonald’s responded to Elon Musk’s push for the fast-food giant to accept Dogecoin ($DOGE) as a payment method. Some Grimacecoins saw their prices explode.
As reported by CoinDesk, one GrimaCoin saw its price pump as much as 285,000% in a few hours after McDonald’s’ response to Musk. As CryptoGlobe reported, Musk pushed for DOGE adoption by saying he would eat a Happy Meal on TV if the fast-food giant accepted the meme-inspired cryptocurrency as payment.
McDonald’s soon replied “only if Tesla accepts grimacecoin” with an image of Grimace, a rotund purple character featured in some of the firm’s marketing campaigns, in a coin attached to it.
While McDonald’s hasn’t created a digital currency itself, its tweet spurred the creation of dozens of such cryptocurrencies on the Binance Smart Chain and Ethereum. Anyone can call a smart contract and issue tokens on decentralized blockchains like these, and the presence of decentralized exchanges means these tokens can be supplied with liquidity and traded shortly after.
One of these grimacecoins saw its price explode from $0.0007 to a $2 peak before tumbling back down, reaching a total market capitalization of $2 million at its peak. In a liquidity pool supplied by users, that coin has $65,000 of liquidity, 93% of which are owned by a single entity.
Another grimacecoin saw its market capitalization reach $1 million before trading down. It locked up $104,000 of liquidity, with 75% belonging to one address. On Ethereum, another grimacecoin surged 56,000%, marketing itself the first one on ETH.
CoinDesk details not all grimacecoins pumped. One example on the Binance Smart Chain failed to attract capital and speculators, and currently has a market capitalization of $1,463.
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