The Instagram profile of fast food chain McDonald’s promoted a fraudulent memecoin deployed on Solana (GROUND) after being compromised.
The token, called GRIMACE, reached a market cap of $25 million within two hours of its launch before being damaged and losing more than 95% of its value.
The scammers, who identified themselves as “India_X_Kr3w,” claim to have stolen about $700,000 from investors who believed the memecoin was an official McDonald’s token.
GRIMACE was deployed via Pump.fun and quickly reached the link curve limit to be deployed on Raydium.
Notably, data from DEX Screener shows that the token managed to amass nearly $20 million in trading volume in two hours. Moreover, investors seem to continue betting on the token as pool liquidity on Raydium is increasing despite the rug pull.
It took McDonald’s nearly two hours to regain access to the account, and all memecoin-related posts had been deleted by press time.
The memecoin frenzy continues
According to Ground scanA daily average of over 17,400 tokens have been deployed to Solana over the past 23 days, indicating that the memecoin frenzy is still in full swing on the network.
Much of this intense memecoin creation can be attributed to Pump.fun, especially after the platform reduced its token creation fees. by adding a reward of 0.5 SOL for tokens successfully launched on Raydium.
Despite the platform’s best efforts, the so-called “trenches” remain vicious. According to a study by Dune Analytics dashboard created by user evelyn233, only 1.39% of the 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 have fizzled out, leaving investors with losses. Meanwhile, Pump.fun’s revenue in fees amounts to approximately 645,580 SOL, or nearly $100 million.
As a result, Solana dominated The monthly volume traded by DEXs in July reached $57.3 billion, surpassing Ethereum by almost $3 billion.
