On August 21, McDonald's Instagram account was hijacked to peddle some new Solana-based memecoin called GRIMACE. The hackers were touting it as "a McDonald's experiment on Solana," some early investors jumped in, thinking they might be on the cusp of the next big thing in crypto.
Even the marketing manager at McDonald's, Guillaume Huin, became a target of this scamming scheme, and hackers posted about GRIMACE from his X (formerly Twitter) page, sort of like an officially coordinated promotion.
The memecoin quickly shot up in value to a $20 million market cap, according to data from pump. fun. But it was a classic "rug pull"—the value of GRIMACE plummeted to under $1 million shortly after. A message from the hackers appeared thanking buyers for $700,000 worth of Solana, indicating that they managed to steal less than 4% of the total value.
A few wallets had invested 6.2 SOL in GRIMACE just before the memecoin went live. Then the McDonald's post appeared, and, in 28 minutes, these wallets cashed out nearly $500,000 in Solana's native currency. The scammers wiped out all posts by McDonald's advertising GRIMACE, and Huin's X account tweets, once the job was done.
To date, neither McDonald's nor Guillaume Huin have commented or acknowledged the event.
Pump. fun is the most famous launchpad for memecoins on Solana. It was there that GRIMACE was born. Since January, it has created some 1.8 million meme-inspired tokens. The vast majority of tokens flopped, but Pump.fun has collected more than $340 million in fees.
The Sun Token platform has entered into the competition to take their share of the growing memecoin market against Solana and Pump.fun. More interestingly, the TRX-based Sun Token ecosystem has been able to rack up more revenue than Ethereum within just 24 hours.
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