Hailey Welch, better known online as the “Hawk Tuah girl” who became an overnight internet sensation with a woman-on-the-street interview, launched her own cryptocurrency on Wednesday. Welch has turned her 15 minutes of internet fame into a full-blown new media endeavor with a podcast. But the content creator was immediately on the defensive after the market cap of her token hit $490 million, only to plunge over 90% just a few hours later.
The Hawk Tuah cryptocurrency, listed as HAWK, was launched on the Solana blockchain and has been billed as a memecoin—crypto that gets a big boost in price thanks to widespread internet attention. Welch told Fortune magazine that HAWK was “not just a cash grab,” though it’s hard to understand how any memecoin could be anything but a way to make enormous amounts of money floated by nothing more than digital hype. That’s all any memecoin is or aspires to be.
But whatever Welch’s motivation, she’s now defending herself against charges that someone on her team has been responsible for a rug pull—the term for launching a coin, getting people to buy it through tremendous hype, and then selling in a manner that extracts all the liquidity, leaving suckers who bought the coin holding worthless ones and zeroes.
Enormous amounts of the coin were sold in the hours after launch, taking the coin from a listed market cap of $490 million to a market cap of just $41.7 million after a few hours, as crypto news outlet CoinTelegraph reports. But that was Wednesday. Here on Thursday, it’s fallen ever further, with a market cap of just $28.4 million and liquidity of just $1.6 million, according to DexScreener.
“Team hasn’t sold one token and not 1 KOL was given 1 free token,” Welch tweeted on Wednesday. “We tried to stop snipers as best we could through high fee’s in the start of launch on @MeteoraAG. Fee’s have now been dropped.”
Copy and pasting:
Hawkanomics:
Team hasn’t sold one token and not 1 KOL was given 1 free token
We tried to stop snipers as best we could through high fee’s in the start of launch on @MeteoraAG
Fee’s have now been dropped pic.twitter.com/E7xN9VmCrx
— Haliey Welch (@HalieyWelchX) December 4, 2024
Welch insists that no one from her team has sold any of her cryptocurrency, but there’s a heated debate on X about whether that’s really the case, with people posting screenshots purporting to show sales they say are from her team. Representatives for Welch didn’t immediately respond to questions about the cryptocurrency emailed Thursday. Gizmodo will update this post if we hear back.
In the meantime, it will be interesting to see what happens to Welch’s crypto experiment. Fundamentally, memecoins don’t serve any useful purpose beyond speculation and wealth extraction. So it’s not clear why anyone would want to buy it unless they thought they could make money selling it for a higher price later. And Welch’s talk with Fortune didn’t suggest she has any bold plans for the token.
From Fortune:
Welch says that she used to think of crypto as “just a scam” and an “easy way for you to lose money,” but changed her mind after attending the conferences. When asked what aspects of crypto appealed to her, she said it was a “really good thing” and a “good way to interact with my fans.” Welch wasn’t aware of any specific benefits that her memecoin holders would receive, though her manager added that they plan to have “more fan engagements around it,” without offering further details.
If you buy this coin, that’s on you. But that’s always the case in the world of crypto.
)
)
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25253483/DSC06441.jpg)
English (US) ·