McDonald’s Under Pressure to Accept Musk’s Favorite Crypto Dogecoin

Buy your fries or your Chicken McNuggets with cryptocurrencies? 

Fans of Dogecoin, which features the image of the Shiba Inu dog as its logo and namesake, are pressuring the fast food giant to allow them to use their favorite currency to pay for their purchases in its restaurants.

And they might win.

It all started when McDonald’s  (MCD) – Get McDonald’s Corporation Report tweeted on Jan. 19 a picture of french fries offering to respond with a specially photoshopped image to anyone snagging a fry. 

Billy Markus, co-founder of Dogecoin, responded.

Basically, the idea is that if a large number of people get involved, McDonald’s  (MCD) – Get McDonald’s Corporation Report would then see an untapped reservoir of potential customers. One person asked McDonald’s if they would consider this, to which the company responded: “We appreciate hearing your interest and continuously evaluate the payments experience.”

Contacted by TheStreet, McDonald’s did not elaborate further.

If McDonald’s were to accept Dogecoin as a means payment, it would be one of the biggest boosts the cryptocurrency has ever received.

There are currently over 1,900 merchants accepting Dogecoin payments as of January 2021, according to Cryptwerk, and that number keeps going up. 

The best known is Tesla  (TSLA) – Get Tesla Inc Report which has been accepting Dogecoin as payment for the purchase of merch from the electric vehicle company since Jan. 14. On the other hand, it is not possible to buy, for the moment, a Tesla car with Dogecoin.

As an early adopter of cryptocurrency, the Dallas Mavericks are the first NBA team to incorporate Dogecoin into their payment system. Mavs fans can purchase game tickets and merchandise using the crypto asset online. 

Owned by billionaire Mark Cuban, the company had previously been using BitPay to process purchases in various cryptocurrencies – including bitcoin and ethereum. 

Last year, the Shark Tank judge said ‘Doge’ was “the people’s way to pay.”

Win-Win Alliance 

Dogecoin has managed to develop a legion of fans who swear by it.

Accepting the cryptocurrency would allow McDonald’s to get its hands on a pool of millennials and Gen Z’s much sought after by advertisers and its competitors. 

The excitement is already on social media, as illustrated by numerous posts on Twitter.

On Reddit, the number of posts favorable to McDonald’s  (MCD) – Get McDonald’s Corporation Report exploded.

“I would apply to McDonald’s right now if they paid in dogecoin,” one comment reads. Another added, “Mcdogin. I’m loving it.”

Dogecoin is considered the first of the so-called “meme coins,” which are inspired by a meme or has some humorous characteristic.

It was created by software engineers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer, who decided to create a payment system as a “joke”, making fun of the wild speculation in cryptocurrencies, as Rob Lenihan of TheStreet wrote.

It has a few obvious benefits for small businesses as compared to bitcoin.

Bitcoin is more of a store value. Dogecoin is better geared for day-to-day transactions due to its unlimited supply, and carries lower transactions fees.

But it remains an extremely speculative play: Its price often jumps on the backs of tweets from Musk or Cuban. 

It’s also worth pointing out that Dogecoin is built using the same energy-intensive proof-of-work mining model that’s caused problems for bitcoin. So if Dogecoin grows, so will its carbon footprint.