McDonald’s Instagram Account Seemingly Hacked To Promote Solana Meme Coin Grimace

• Hackers seemingly hacked McDonald’s Instagram page on Aug. 21 to market GRIMACE, a meme coin launched via pump.fun on the Solana blockchain. 

Solana meme coins collided on Aug. 21 as hackers compromised McDonald’s Instagram page, as bad actors used the global fast-food chain’s social media to promote Solana-based GRIMACE. 

McDonald’s marketing director Guillaume Huin also posted about the meme coin on his X page in an apparent double attack.

Hackers pitched GRIMACE as “a McDonald’s experiment on Solana,” and early investors chasing the next moonshot bought in. Per pump.fun data, the meme coin bolted to a $20 million valuation. The swift rug pull crashed GRIMACE under $1 million in market cap shortly after. 

A message appeared thanking buyers for $700,000 worth of Solana, suggesting the hackers siphoned less than 4% of the token’s entire value. 

Two minutes before it launched, several wallets invested 6.2 SOL in GRIMACE, and the McDonald’s post went live. The addresses pocketed nearly $500,000 in Solana’s native currency 28 minutes later.

The culprits deleted all McDonald’s posts promoting Solana’s meme coin GRIMACE, including Huin’s tweets on X. At press time, neither Huin nor McDonald had responded to commentary requests from Bitcoinworld, or acknowledged the incident.

Pump.fun is an easy-to-use meme coin launchpad on Solana. Developers aplenty have used the protocol to launch 1.8 million meme-inspired tokens. Most of the tokens have crashed, and Pump.fun has generated over $340 million in fees since its launch in January. 

Tron (TRX) and its SunPump Sun Token platform were launched to compete with Solana and Pump.fun to take a share of the bustling meme coin issuance market. The TRX-based meme ecosystem has raised more revenue than Ethereum in 24 hours.