Grimace, the purple blob character in McDonald’s advertising, is a complicated guy. When he first appeared in 1971, he played the villain, a stolen milkshake often clutched in each of his four—four!—arms. The company called him “Evil Grimace.” But as Grimace found, it’s hard to make crime pay forever. A decade or so later, McDonald’s rethought him rather significantly, reduced his arms by two, dropped the epithet from his name and turned him into Ronald McDonald’s dopey sidekick.
Unfortunately for Grimace, his legacy has grown even more complex after a weird swirl of events Tuesday. Over the past day, more than a half-dozen meme coins using Grimace’s name and image have been minted and subsequently shilled widely on social media, mostly on Twitter and Discord. Despite the broader price plummet among established cryptocurrencies, the Grimace coins attracted nearly a million dollars in collective market value within hours. Like most meme coins, the Grimace coin creators are anonymous. And like all meme coins, they lack any intrinsic value, and their owners have limited protections. In the past, meme coins have been the source of scams. (Remember the recent Squid Coin swindle?) Grimace’s accidental rise to crypto front man registers as the latest cautionary chapter in the on-going tragicomedy surrounding cryptocurrency, a technology with real promise, mostly as a better digital record-keeping system, but one that’s also a popular instrument for criminals, which ends up making everything crypto seem shady by association.
Trading things like the Grimaces amounts to people “gambling with each other,” says Billy Markus, the software engineer who created the very first meme coin, DogeCoin, in 2013. In the casino Markus describes, “most lose, some win,” he says, “and the game is usually rigged.”
To back up some, this all started Tuesday morning when Elon Musk tweeted at Grimace’s corporate parent, offering to eat a Happy Meal on live television if McDonald’s started accepting DogeCoin. (OK, let’s back up even more: Musk is a longtime supporter of DogeCoin. He mentioned it during his Saturday Night Live appearance last May and has continued to publicly tout the cryptocurrency on Twitter—even as it sank nearly 80% from its record high last spring.)
Musk’s offer to McDonald’s may seem out of the blue. It really shouldn’t. He loves to stir the internet’s pot, to provoke conversation around things he supposedly likes and many other people don’t. The other thing is, it wouldn’t be crazy for McDonald’s to take him up on it and capitalize on a viral marketing moment that cost nothing. An ever-growing list of big-banner businesses — Microsoft, PayPal, Starbucks, AT&T, Overstock.com, Twitch, Twitter, Crate and Barrel, Nordstrom and on and on — accept some form of cryptocurrency payment. Why not McDonald’s, too, especially if it could get a TV spot with the world’s richest person out of it?