Fast food chain McDonald’s Instagram profile promoted a scam memecoin deployed on Solana (SOL) after being compromised.
The token – called GRIMACE – reached a market cap of $25 million within two hours of launch before going rogue and losing more than 95% of its value.
The scammers, who identified themselves as ‘India_X_Kr3w’, claim to have taken around $700,000 from investors who believed the memecoin was an official McDonald’s token.
GRIMACE was deployed via Pump.fun and quickly reached the limit of the bonding curve to be deployed on Raydium.
Notably, data from DEX Screener shows that the token managed to amass nearly $20 million in trading volume within two hours. Moreover, investors appear to continue betting on the token as liquidity from the pool on Raydium is growing despite the uptrend.
It took almost two hours for McDonald’s to restore access to the account, and all posts related to the memecoin have been deleted at the time of writing.
The memecoin frenzy continues
According to SolscanOver the past 23 days, an average of over 17,400 tokens have been staked daily on Solana, 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 lowered its token creation fees while adding a reward of 0.5 SOL for tokens successfully launched on Raydium.
Despite the platform’s best efforts, the so-called “trenches” are still brutal. According to Dune Analytics dashboard created by user evelyn233, only 1.39% of the more than 1.8 million tokens created on Pump.fun so far have successfully completed the bonding curve.
This means that almost 99% of all memecoins created on the Solana-based marketplace have disappeared, leaving investors with losses. Meanwhile, Pump.fun’s revenue from fees is approximately 645,580 SOL, equivalent to almost $100 million.
As a result, Solana dominated the monthly trading volume recorded by DEXs in July was $57.3 billion – surpassing Ethereum by almost $3 billion.
