Life in the world of cryptocurrency: A tweet about one joke coin that evolved into a real one has inadvertently created a second joke coin that has done the same thing. It's all thanks to McDonald's and Elon Musk. On Tuesday, Musk issued a request to McDonald's to begin accepting his beloved dogecoin—he even promised to eat a Happy Meal. McDonald's responded with a jokey tweet, saying it would do so only when Musk's Tesla began accepting the fictional "grimacecoin." Almost immediately, several "grimacecoins"—featuring the familiar McDonald's figure Grimace—were created on the Binance Smart Chain, reports CoinDesk.
The coins weren't just created, however, some of them began surging in value—one began trading at $0.0007 and reached $2 within a matter of hours. It later fell back to 60 cents. It's a classic case of a "meme coin" taking off, explains Fortune:
- "Anybody can create a cryptocurrency, and when a meme goes viral, it’s likely that someone will create a coin to capitalize on the hype. Mass purchasing of the coin can shoot the price up quickly, but it can drop dramatically from hour to hour and investors can lose everything they put in. Yet the massive price rise can still net a token’s creator hundreds or thousands of dollars."
In fact, dogecoin itself began as a joke several years ago, but it's now a well-established crypto coin that has made a lot of money for a lot of people—and undoubtedly lost a lot of money for a lot of people, too. (More
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