Can the $McRib Meme Coin Get Back to $1 Million Before McDonald’s Pulls the Menu?

On October 22, a McDonald’s marketing executive confirmed on X that the McRib is coming back this year: October 27, six cities to start with. Even the city lists in that day’s coverage don’t agree with each other, which I’ll come back to. On its own, it’s a food story.

The same day, a token called The McRib Indicator showed up on Solana. Its first pool opened at 19:23 UTC. Five and a half hours later the market cap had gone from $27,000 to $1.03 million, on roughly $6.11 million of 24-hour volume. By the morning of October 23 it had given back close to 60%.

The token is less than a day old, so there is no history worth discussing. What makes it different is the name. Most meme coins put a thing in the ticker: a cat, a dog, a photo. This one puts a claim in it — the McRib comes back, Bitcoin goes up. A claim like that can be checked against price history. So what buyers are betting on is whether anyone still wants to repeat it next month.

Where the claim came from

It has been passed around for a few years: every time the McRib returns, Bitcoin rallies.

The tidiest version is a post from the market account Bitcoin Archive on November 11, 2025, which lined up four cases — November 2017, December 2020, November 2021, December 2024 — each followed by a percentage gain.

The trouble with “indicators” like this is that you get to choose both ends of the comparison. The start is called “the day it came back”, except that the McRib never comes back on a single date. The end is looser still: a week later, or a year later. Choose both and you can produce a hit.

McDonald’s has repeated the line too. On November 10, 2025, the company’s marketing executive posted about the return and mentioned that some people say Bitcoin and the S&P 500 do better when the McRib is around. A burger chain has no reason to deny a joke that works in its favor. Once the brand says it out loud, a forum line becomes something a reporter can quote, and that is part of why this coin is worth more than the average joke token.

Six returns, and what Bitcoin did after each

McRib return	BTC close that day	30 days later	90 days later
2017-11-02 (select markets)	$7,040	+55.3%	+43.5%
2020-12-02 (nationwide)	$19,226	+53.0%	+152.3%
2021-11-01 (nationwide)	$60,950	-6.1%	-37.8%
2022-10-31 (nationwide)	$20,490	-16.2%	+15.9%
2024-12-03 (nationwide)	$95,925	+1.0%	-10.2%
2025-11-11 (select markets)	$103,009	-10.2%	-31.9%

Six returns, three up and three down at the 30-day mark. Average +12.8%, median -2.5%. All the work in that average is done by 2017 and 2020. The median is what usually happens, and it is a loss.

The 90-day column reads the same way: mean +22.0%, median +2.9%, both carried by the same two years.

The most recent return went the other direction. After November 11, 2025, Bitcoin was down 10.2% at 30 days and 31.9% at 90. There is also a version of the story claiming December 2024 was “a new high”. The December 3, 2024 close was $95,925. The actual closing high came on October 6, 2025, at $124,720 — ten months after that return.

The start date isn’t fixed either. McDonald’s says October 27, but USA Today’s own piece carries two different city lists, six in one spot and eight in another, and people were already posting receipts on McRib Locator this week. Take the official date or the first receipt and the result moves by days, which is enough to change the percentage.

What buyers are actually betting on

Not on whether the claim is true. On whether anyone is still saying it next month.

Two things decide that over the next month. One is the stretch between October 27 and the menu coming down (usually three to four weeks; the 2024 run lasted into January): whether any outlet writes the “indicator was right again” piece. Someone writes it, someone new buys. The other is Bitcoin, which sits at $81,700, 34.5% below its October 6, 2025 closing high. If it rallies this month, the people who believe the indicator have an example to point at. If it drifts, nobody brings it up.

One aside: if you actually believe the indicator, the trade is Bitcoin, not this token. This token asks you to bet on Bitcoin and on the joke staying alive at the same time. Two bets on one view, and you only have to lose one.

Everyone in this story except the buyer gets paid. The launcher collects fees and holds coins, the accounts that recommend it gain followers, market outlets get clicks. They don’t need the indicator to work, because every retelling pays. That is why the line keeps circulating and why nobody checks it afterwards. Only the buyer has to wait for it to come true.

What the token looks like on-chain

The contract is 8idEA8QovsZJka6d9Z35fejE5MbL37BJxvw5k5r6pump, a Token-2022 token on Solana, launched on pump.fun with no presale and all 970 million coins in circulation.

As of 07:35 UTC on October 23, the price is $0.000455, the market cap about $440,000, and $6.11 million has traded in the past 24 hours. In the first hour after the pool opened, the low worked out to a $27,000 market cap; by 01:00 UTC the cap had touched $1.03 million. Open to peak is 37.7x, and the price now sits 57% below that peak.

Liquidity totals $147,000, with $68,000 in the main pool. Holder accounts: 16,241. RugCheck reports the same figure.

The top ten addresses hold 24.3%, and 10 points of that comes from pools. The largest, at 7.78%, is the main pool itself; the second, at 2.37%, is another pool on Meteora. Strip those two out and the biggest single address holds 2.29%.

The contract itself is clean: mint and freeze authority both revoked, metadata locked, 0% transfer tax, and the pump.fun pool’s liquidity burned. RugCheck flags no risks, though it does group 110 wallets that have passed coins among themselves; the largest cluster, six addresses, holds about 9.7%. Groupings like that tend to merge unrelated wallets. I don’t treat it as proof, and I don’t pretend I didn’t see it.

The pools deserve a closer look. Besides the main one, seven others sit on Meteora and Orca, and not one of them has locked liquidity. A burned main pool doesn’t make the others safe. If somebody pulls, they pull those seven.

Turnover is fast. The main pool saw 55,240 buys and 43,767 sells in 24 hours, 26% more buys than sells. New money keeps arriving, and most of it leaves again, which is why a full round trip inside one day isn’t unusual here.

So the risk isn’t in the contract. It sits in the pools and in time: seven side pools with unlocked liquidity, and the question of how many people are still around in mid-to-late November, which decides whether it holds this market cap.

Copied onto four chains in 24 hours

A DexScreener search for “mcrib” returns 30 pairs. Remove the duplicate pools on the same contract and 28 different contracts remain: this one on Solana, one on Ethereum with a market cap near $310,000, 16 on Robinhood Chain (all between $48,000 and $83,000), and 10 on Arc.

The Arc ten are the ones worth a second look. Every address ends in 7777, and liquidity sits in a narrow band between $23,000 and $26,000. That doesn’t look like ten people arriving at the same joke. It looks like one script.

Solana is more direct. Of the 60 pools tied to this token, 57 price the other side in McRib — McChicken/McRib, FRIES/McRib, BigMac/McRib, all open for trading. Within a day, people were pricing other coins in it.

None of those fifty-odd versions is “official”. The name isn’t copyrighted, nobody has to approve its use, and tools like pump.fun squeeze the gap between an idea and a tradable pool down to minutes. So the competition between same-name tokens isn’t over whose story is better. It’s over who gets money into the pool first, so that someone can buy. One of them keeps the crowd. The rest go quiet when the menu does.

Four things I’ll watch for the rest of the month

Start with October 27. Launch-day coverage will be the heaviest, but USA Today and Dexerto are already on it today, and both land on the sandwich and on Bitcoin. Neither mentions a token. If a “the indicator was right” piece appears after the 27th, that is the news this coin needs: somebody else retelling the story for it.

Bitcoin comes next. The token can’t move it, but its name is a claim about it.

Then the menu. Recent runs have mostly lasted three to four weeks (the 2024 one ran into January), and when it comes down the “return” is over. There is no next episode.

Finally, pools and holders. The main pool’s liquidity is burned, so a pull there isn’t the near-term risk. The question is whether the holder count collapses in mid-to-late November. If it is still above 15,000 a month from now, somebody is genuinely waiting for a second telling.

Three scenarios

One: a launch-day pop. Another run around October 27, market cap back above $1 million and touching $2 to $3 million, then fading as the menu goes away. It doesn’t take much to push it around. $6.11 million traded in 24 hours says money moves in and out quickly, and a few tens of thousands of dollars can lift the price a notch.

Two, and the one I think is most likely: $300,000 to $800,000, back and forth. Volume falls from $6.11 million to under $1 million. The joke is still there, but there is no new version of it to tell, so it gains a little and gives back more.

Three: it goes down with Bitcoin. Bitcoin keeps falling, “the indicator failed” becomes the consensus, and the copycats on four chains split the traffic. Back under $100,000. Part of that $440,000 is buyers who believe the claim actually predicts something. If that belief goes, there is nothing left to hold the price up.

How I’m playing it

It is worth something because people keep talking about it, and there is a hard end date on the talking: McDonald’s takes the menu down.

My position is small. Losing all of it would change nothing for me. I won’t borrow to buy, and I won’t add money because the indicator “worked” one day; it doesn’t hold up, as the table shows. If the coin rallies after the 27th, that means people are still telling the story, not that the arithmetic was wrong. The table measures 30 and 90 days; one or two days say nothing.

I go by the contract address above and nothing else. The name is too easy to copy: 28 contracts already carry it across four chains.

Last word

Meme coins don’t claim to be investments. This one is a joke, and you pay for the joke if you want it.

This one has something most jokes don’t: a claim attached that can be checked. Check it and it fails, which leaves an ordinary meme coin. Even if it held up, it would still be a meme coin — just one nobody has called out yet.

After October 27, McDonald’s will keep selling sandwiches and Bitcoin will keep moving. Those two facts have nothing to do with each other. What matters is whether anyone still wants to put them in the same sentence.

About me

I’m Louise Lee. I’ve spent years in crypto and now work as a researcher at Tronsell.io. I read through new tokens and write up the ones that look interesting, for anyone who cares to read.

Tronsell.io focuses on lowering transaction costs on TRON: a self-operated energy pool staking about 400 million TRX, outputting roughly 3.7 billion energy and 35 million bandwidth, serving more than 10 institutional clients. The work is about bringing on-chain costs down. It has nothing to do with the token in this article.

Fact card (data as of 2026-10-23 07:35 UTC)

Item	Data
Token	The McRib Indicator (McRib)
Contract	8idEA8QovsZJka6d9Z35fejE5MbL37BJxvw5k5r6pump (Solana, Token-2022, 6 decimals)
First pool	PumpSwap, McRib/SOL, 2026-10-22 19:23 UTC; the pump.fun bonding-curve pool opened a minute earlier
Launch	pump.fun fair launch, no presale; mint and freeze authority revoked, metadata immutable, 0% transfer tax
Supply	969,930,126 (on-chain getTokenSupply), fully circulating
Price	about $0.000455
Market cap	about $440,000
24-hour volume	about $6.11 million across all pairs; main pool about $5.09 million
Liquidity	about $147,000 total; main pool about $68,000 (LP 100% locked); 7 other pools (6 Meteora, 1 Orca) with unlocked LP
Holder accounts	16,241 (Solana mainnet RPC and RugCheck agree)
Top-10 concentration	about 24.3% combined; #1 at 7.78% is the main pool, #2 at 2.37% is a Meteora pool; largest single address 2.29% once both are removed
All-time high	about $0.001064 / about $1.03 million (2026-10-23 01:00 UTC)
All-time low	about $0.0000282 / about $27,000 (first hour, 2026-10-22)
Exchange listings	no confirmed centralized spot listing
McDonald’s	no affiliation of any kind; McDonald’s and its affiliates have not issued or endorsed any token
Same-name warning	a DexScreener search for “mcrib” returns 30 pairs across 28 contracts — Solana, Ethereum, Robinhood Chain (16), Arc (10); Solana also has 57 pools quoting McRib as of 07:35. Use the contract above

Sources

The 2026 McRib return

1. USA Today (2026-10-22): McDonald’s confirmed the McRib returns Tuesday, October 27, in select cities. The piece carries two different city lists — six (Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Dallas) and eight (Atlanta, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, Los Angeles, Miami, Seattle, St. Louis) — and notes that consumers had already reported buying it on McRib Locator this week in San Antonio, Charlotte, Kearney and Overland Park.
2. Dexerto (2026-10-22): Guillaume Huin, McDonald’s senior marketing director, posted the return on X that day; citing information McDonald’s gave The National Provisioner, some Michigan locations start October 26, with other reports pointing to November 2 in some regions. The piece also revisits the “McRib return, Bitcoin rally” claim and cites Decrypt’s earlier, contrary observation.
3. Yahoo Life / People (2026-10-22): October 27, six cities, more to be announced.
4. Tasting Table (2024): nationwide return on December 3, 2024, with the first half-gallon McRib sauce release.

Previous return dates

1. Grokipedia, “McRib”: October 31, 2022 farewell tour; select markets from November 13, 2023; nationwide December 3, 2024; select markets from November 11, 2025.
2. Several aggregator sites (eathealthy365, flavorycooking) and public records: nationwide returns on December 2, 2020 and November 1, 2021; Southern California, Hawaii and other markets from November 2, 2017. Local dates differ; this article uses the date most coverage cites.

The “McRib indicator” claim

1. Bitcoin Archive (X, 2025-11-11): four returns — 2017, 2020, 2021, 2024 — each paired with a Bitcoin gain; the post describes every return as bringing an “explosive move” in Bitcoin.
2. Guillaume Huin (X, 2025-11-10): announced the November 11, 2025 return and mentioned that some people say Bitcoin and the S&P 500 perform better after the McRib returns.
3. InvestX (2025-11): traced how the claim spread and reproduced analyst Zack Voell’s comparison chart, while recording the counter-case — some years moved the other way, and the McRib window overlaps with the year-end rise in risk appetite anyway.

Bitcoin prices

1. Coinbase Exchange BTC-USD daily candles (granularity 86400): every close and every 30/90-day change in the table comes from this series, with the base day being the return date or the nearest trading day. The highest close between 2024-10-01 and 2026-10-23 was $124,720.09 (2025-10-06); the latest price at 07:35 UTC on 2026-10-23 was $81,682 (Kraken XBT/USD).

On-chain and trading data

1. DexScreener: price, market cap, liquidity, 24-hour volume and pool creation times for all 30 pairs on the contract (pump.fun bonding curve 2026-10-22 19:22 UTC; PumpSwap main pool 19:23 UTC).
2. GeckoTerminal: hourly candles for the main pool; the all-time high of $0.0010636 (2026-10-23 01:00 UTC) and the first-hour low of $0.0000282 come from this source. Its reported supply of 977,880,342 does not match the chain, so this article uses the RPC figure throughout.
3. RugCheck: 16,241 holders, total liquidity, 100% locked main-pool LP, no risk flags, 110 insider wallet networks, mint and freeze authority both empty.
4. Solana mainnet RPC (getProgramAccounts filtered by mint on the Token-2022 program): 16,241 holder accounts counted directly, consistent with RugCheck at the same moment; getTokenSupply returns 969,930,126.165981 (07:34 UTC).
5. DexScreener keyword search for “mcrib”: 30 pairs across 28 contracts (Solana 1, Ethereum 1, Robinhood Chain 16, Arc 10); all 10 Arc contract addresses end in 7777, with liquidity between $23,100 and $25,700.
6. GeckoTerminal, full pool list for the token (three pages, 60 pools): 57 of them price the other token in McRib as of 07:35, and the number keeps climbing.

Note: prices, market cap, liquidity, volume and holder counts are as of 07:35 UTC on 2026-10-23, the time stamped on the fact card. The token is under 24 hours old, so “all-time high” and “all-time low” only describe the range since the pool opened and carry no statistical weight. The Bitcoin percentages were calculated from Coinbase daily candles and may differ from numbers repeated elsewhere; those differences are noted in the text. Where sources disagree (local launch dates, city lists), the text says so instead of quietly picking one. 24-hour volume, trade counts and holder numbers are rolling figures and change with the time you look; the pool count on GeckoTerminal rises every hour, and this article uses the single 07:35 reading.

Disclaimer

This is a personal research note. It is not investment advice and it sets no price target. Meme coin prices are extremely volatile; the token discussed here is less than a day old, its issuer is anonymous, it has no connection to McDonald’s, the McRib or any food company, and its contract is unaudited. The real risks include going to zero and being unable to sell. Names and trademarks belong to their respective owners. The arithmetic on the “McRib indicator” is here to show what the claim rests on, not to forecast anything. Past performance is not a guide to future results. Use only money you can lose entirely without it mattering. Sitting this one out is a perfectly good choice.