McRib

McDonald's Senior Marketing Director Guillaume Huin announced the McRib is coming back on October 27, and in the same post he brought up a joke crypto has been telling for years: Bitcoin tends to do well whenever the McRib returns.

That joke is the McRib Indicator. Traders point to the comebacks in 2017, 2020 and 2021, and Huin himself wrote that it peaked in December 2024, when Bitcoin broke $100K the same day the sandwich came back.

Within a day, Coinbase posted "The McRib is coming back soon btw. IYKYK." to its 7M followers, and Dexerto explained the theory to its mainstream audience. A crypto in-joke got airtime from McDonald's, the biggest US exchange and a major media account in the same 24 hours. None of them mentioned the token, but that's the point: the meme already existed long before $McRib did.

It also renews itself. Every time McDonald's brings the McRib back, the indicator trends again, and every Bitcoin rally that follows adds to the lore.

$McRib gives one of crypto's longest-running jokes a ticker, and now McDonald's is in on it too.