Fast food chain McDonald’s’ Instagram profile promoted a scam memecoin deployed on Solana (SOL) after being compromised.
The token — called GRIMACE — hit a $25 million market capitalization within two hours of its launch before it was rugged and lost more than 95% of its value.
The scammers, who identified themselves as “India_X_Kr3w,” claim to have snagged roughly $700,000 from investors who believed the memecoin was an official McDonald’s’ token.
GRIMACE was deployed via Pump.fun and quickly reached the bonding curve limit to be deployed on Raydium.
Notably, DEX Screener data shows that the token managed to amass nearly $20 million in trading volume within two hours. Additionally, investors seem to keep betting on the token, as the liquidity from the pool on Raydium is growing despite the rug pull.
It took nearly two hours for McDonald’s to recover access to the account, and all posts related to the memecoin have been deleted as of press time.
Memecoin frenzy continues
According to Solscan, a daily average of over 17,400 tokens were deployed on Solana in the past 23 days, indicating that the memecoin frenzy is still in full swing on the network.
Most of this intense memecoin creation can be attributed to Pump.fun, especially after the platform slashed its fees for token creation while adding a 0.5 SOL reward for tokens that are successfully launched on Raydium.
Despite the platform’s best efforts, the so-called “trenches” are still vicious. According to a Dune Analytics dashboard created by user evelyn233, only 1.39% of over 1.8 million tokens created so far on Pump.fun have successfully completed the bonding curve.
This means that nearly 99% of all memecoins created on the Solana-based marketplace fizzled out and left investors with losses. Meanwhile, Pump.fun’s revenue in fees stands at roughly 645,580 SOL, equivalent to nearly $100 million.
As a result, Solana dominated the monthly traded volume registered by DEXs in July, hitting $57.3 billion — surpassing Ethereum by nearly $3 billion.
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