In January 2022, Elon Musk promised to eat a “Happy Meal” on live television if McDonald’s starts accepting payments in Dogecoin. The company responded with a proposal to Tesla to sell electric cars for the fictional token Grimacecoin.
The McDonald’s joke spawned a wave of token launches under a fictional name. One of them was Grimace on an EVM-compatible blockchain Dogechain. At present it is traded on exchanges Bitget and MEXC.
ForkLog spoke with Grimace’s CEO Odyssey about the project’s positioning, philanthropy and balabashers, and learned when 1 GRIMACE will be worth 1 BTC.
ForkLog: Tell us about yourself. What did you do before you came to crypto trading?
Odyssey: I slept under a bridge, like Hitler, and composed third-rate poetry, like Brodsky.
ForkLog: Initially your Telegram channel was named “dokins trading postmodern”. You almost immediately renamed it to “Odyssey of Captain Blah”, and some time later — to “Odyssey Grimace”. However Igor Ushakov’s illustration for Rafael Sabatini’s novel “The Odyssey of Captain Blood” has remained unchanged since 2020. Do you remember why you chose these names and the photo?
Odyssey: At the moment I created the channel I was drunk and I simply plugged in a random name and a random illustration.
ForkLog: And what did you live on before Grimace?
Odyssey: I rode the bull market of 2021. Spent what I earned, gradually dumped into futures.
ForkLog: Why did you decide to get involved in the Elon Musk and McDonald’s story? What were your motives?
Odyssey: There were no motives. I just created a shitcoin; four months later someone bought it — and it took off.
ForkLog: How many people are currently working on the project? Who is in the Grimace team?
Odyssey: About 50 regulars, about 500 irregular volunteers.
ForkLog: In the Telegram channel you assert that Grimace is the first post-cryptocurrency. Could you explain to our readers what that means?
Odyssey: “Postepoch” is an era fundamentally different from the old one. It has outgrown old values, superstitions, mistakes, and is founded on new principles.
Many, coming to the project, note that in all the years on the market they have never seen anything like this. If anything, this is because no CEO before a x10 run writes “this will be x10.” And in general they have noticeable trouble delivering those x’s.
ForkLog: How does Grimace differ from other meme tokens? How do you persuade newcomers that you are not a scam?
Odyssey: A scam is a fraud in which people lose money. If even the Grimace team planned it, it turned out badly: people only earned.
Grimace grew 100,000-fold; ecosystem projects yielded from 100x to 10,000x. It was a whole local micro-trend amid a dying market.
You could say Grimace has already given its all, and the rest would fade, but we have not done even a hundredth of what we planned, and have not reached even a tenth of the audience we could. Therefore we are still in the early stages.
ForkLog: Tell us about the community around Grimace.
Odyssey: Around Grimace formed the most powerful community ever seen in crypto history.
They are often called bots, because they are numerous, ubiquitous and incredibly persistent — most people find it hard to believe this activity does not come from AI. But they are real people who really love the project, and they do everything they can to help promote it.
ForkLog: Who are the balabashers? Why balabashers?
Odyssey: Because at one of the local AMAs, a woman, whose voice sounded like an elderly person, burst in. She promised to “balabash” Grimace across Italy, and the community reacted warmly to this.
The woman was named Natalia; everyone loved her, and the name stuck. Since then — balabashers.
ForkLog: The project has a charitable organisation G.O.D. (Grimace, Odyssey, Donations). Is it true that it receives funds from selling Grimace-branded T-shirts?
Odyssey: Not exactly. The costs of T-shirts do not correlate with the charity’s expenditures: at the moment they significantly exceed any revenue from sales.
ForkLog: What does G.O.D. spend the funds on?
Odyssey: The charity has no specific objective: it simply goes where there is a paucity of selfless help, and fixes things.
ForkLog: You released the game PaperHands and the DEX Grimace Swap. What is the team working on now and how do you plan to develop the ecosystem?
Odyssey: I’ll leave that unanswered. No matter how epoch-making the product is, if you announce its release, there won’t be a wow-effect. And we still love a show.
ForkLog: The project has a fairly concise roadmap: 1 GRIMACE = 1 BTC. When, in your view, will we see this parity — before Bitcoin hits $100,000 or after?
Odyssey: After Bitcoin hits $10,000. A few years ago, when it was around $3,000, I believed in it as much as many others, but now I think it has exhausted its potential and has an infinite downside with only a tiny upside.
ForkLog: And how do you assess the current state of the crypto market overall?
Odyssey: At most a thousandth of it offers optimism — Grimace and its ecosystem. Otherwise, things are pretty dire, and it’s unlikely this trend will change in the next couple of years.
ForkLog: In the interview “People PRO” you said you are fairly skeptical about listings on centralized exchanges and CEXs in general, although Grimace trades on Bitget and MEXC. Do you plan to add the token to other CEXs or do you still focus on decentralized platforms like Grimace Swap?
Odyssey: No new CEX listings are planned. If the asset is in demand, a user will sign up on a new platform for it. If it is not in demand — a hundred listings will not help.
Banale example — Chia Network. So there is no reason to expect exchanges to develop, although if a window were to open on Binance or OKX, we would surely go there.
ForkLog: You admitted you strongly dislike literary fiction but recommended All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren. What other books have impressed you in recent years?
Odyssey: I am quite zealous about books. Often you search for a single author for many years, and when you discover them, you realise—damn, this trader of thoughts satisfied demand better than any surrogate hawker before. And then a banal greed arises: you’ve walked through thousands of stalls with trinkets, and now you’ll tell your neighbour where the treasure is? No, let them undertake their own painful odyssey.
I can share only the popular authors. Hoffmann is a sorcerer, the tales of which in depth can outstrip any serious prose from so-called “great” grafomaniacs like Victor Hugo or Thomas Mann.
Otherwise, any fiction will always yield to reality, and it’s better to turn to the autobiographies of Herzen, Stanislavski, or Nabokov than to fill your head with the unreadable rubbish of War and Peace and other such nonsense.