Yesterday, Elon Musk did it again and one of his tweets led to the creation of a new cryptocurrency. It is not the first time the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX shakes the crypto world just by making use of his Twitter account. This time, it was due to an exchange with none other than the fast-food giant McDonald’s.
It all started with Musk’s tweet assuring: “I will eat a happy meal on tv if @McDonalds accepts Dogecoin.” The golden arches replied with another tweet: “only if @tesla accepts grimacecoin,” referring to what, at the moment, was a made-up cryptocurrency based on a purple blob-like character sometimes featured in McDonald’s commercials.
Almost immediately, the Grimace Coin popped up on the Binance Smart Chain Network and an official website was created for the token. Even though it doesn’t appear on CoinMarketCap or CoinGecko, Grimace Coin already has more than 1,000 holders and a diluted market cap of more than US$2 million.
According to Grimace Coin’s website: “Grimace Coin has a mission to surpass all the meme coins and become the most popular people’s coin in the world”. They even have a white paper and a roadmap with a mobile game release scheduled for February or March this year and a development of future features chosen by the community, along with a mobile app scheduled for April or June.
A spokesperson from McDonald’s assured that McDonald’s is not affiliated with any Grimace Coin currency, but apparently someone saw an opportunity to do business and created the coin, since anybody can do so. Mass purchasing of the coin can shoot the price up quickly, but it can fall as suddenly as it rose. Yet the massive price rise may mean hundreds or thousands of dollars for the quick-thinking creator.
It is still too soon to tell if this is the case, but some unreliable tokens are often called s***coins, a derogatory term that seeks to signal assets that are fraudulent, unattractive, have no value, lack a white paper explaining the project, are created by shadowy developers, or have failed. However, there is no scale to measure when a digital currency becomes a S***coin, so classifying a token as such depends on the analyst or individual and their view of the digital asset market.
