The crypto market is a very curious environment. Far from the regulation of financial markets and standardized instruments, crypto sees the creation of all sorts of tokens and concepts like McDonald’s pumping the Grimace.
Indeed, some are technological innovations like Ethereum, Solana, or Uniswap, others are jokes or scams that take off for sometimes absurd reasons.
A new star is born?
A token created after a tweet from McDonald’s jumped 285.641% in a few hours as opportunistic players jumped at the chance to make money in a tepid crypto market.
A plethora of tokens
The tweet in question stimulated the creation of nearly 10 grimacecoins on the Binance Smart Chain (BSC) network alone. Anyone can name a smart contract and issue tokens on BSC (or other blockchains) for pennies, and the presence of decentralized exchanges means that tokens can be instantly issued, fed with cash, and traded soon after.
The principle doesn’t matter, as long as there’s money to be made surfing trending topics, there will be a margin plus useless tokens. One such grimacecoin token started trading at $0.0007 and reached $2 at its peak in the morning in Asia before falling back to the $0.60 level.
The token reached a market capitalization of nearly $2 million at the price peak. It has more than $65,000 in a liquidity pool created and fed by users. However, blockchain data shows that 93% of these tokens are held by a single entity.
Another grimacecoin – with an offering of 1 trillion tokens – reached a market capitalization of $1 million in the morning in Asia, as prices climbed to $0.00000193 from a tiny fraction a few hours earlier. This grimacecoin has locked up $104,000 in cash, 75% of which is held by a single address.
The grimacecoins were not limited to the BSC network. An Ethereum-based grimacecoin jumped 56,000% within hours of being issued, reached 1,000 holders, and reached a market capitalization of $6 million, with the developers touting it as the “first” grimacecoin on the Ethereum network.
First come, first served
Not all grimacecoins have had similar success, however. Latecomers have failed to attract capital and speculators, missing out on memes.
Grimacecoin is not the only example of crypto-currencies based on wind. In December 2021, US House of Representatives member Brad Sherman joked about a “mongoose currency” at a hearing on cryptocurrencies, which led to hundreds of mongoosecoins being issued within hours.
The most popular mongoosecoin of this cohort recorded trading volumes of more than $15 million in the week following its issuance, reaching a market capitalization of tens of millions of dollars. Prices have since fallen by 95%.
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