Hailey Welch, better known online as the “Hawk Tuah girl” who became an overnight Internet sensation with a interview with a woman on the streetlaunched its cryptocurrency on Wednesday. Welch turned her 15 minutes of Internet fame into a full-blown new media venture with a podcast. But the content creator was immediately on the defensive after her token’s market capitalization reached $490 million, only to plummet more than 90% just hours later.
The Hawk Tuah cryptocurrency, listed as HAWK, was launched on the Solana blockchain and was advertised as a memecoin, a cryptocurrency that gets a big price boost thanks to widespread internet attention. Welch said Fortune magazine that HAWK “wasn’t just a money grab,” although it’s hard to understand how a memecoin could be anything other than a way to make huge amounts of money floating on digital hype alone. This is all that any memecoin is or aspires to be.
But whatever Welch’s motivations, he is now defending himself against accusations that someone on his team was responsible for a rug pull – the term for flipping a coin, getting people to buy it through a tremendous advertising campaign, and then selling it in a way that extracts all the liquidity, leaving the gullible who bought the currency holding worthless ones and zeros.
Huge amounts of the coin were sold in the hours following the launch, taking the coin from a listed market cap of $490 million to a market cap of just $41.7 million after just a few hours, as reported by cryptocurrency news . CoinTelegraph relationships. But that was Wednesday. Here it fell even further on Thursday, with a market capitalization of just $28.4 million and cash of just $1.6 million, according to DexScreener.
“The team did not sell a token and 1 KOL was not given 1 free token,” Welch tweeted Wednesday. “We tried to stop snipers as best we could by imposing high fees at the start of the launch @MeteoraAG. Rates have now been lowered.”
Copy and paste:
Hawkanomics:
The team did not sell a token and 1 KOL was not given 1 free token
We tried to stop snipers as best we could through high rates at the start of the launch @MeteoraAG
Rates have now been lowered pic.twitter.com/E7xN9VmCrx
— Haliey Welch (@HalieyWelchX) December 4, 2024
Welch insists that no one on her team sold her cryptocurrency, but there is heated debate at X over whether this is actually the case, with people posting screenshots purporting to show sales they say came from her team. Representatives for Welch did not immediately respond to questions about the cryptocurrency emailed Thursday. Gizmodo will update this post if we receive a response.
In the meantime, it will be interesting to see what happens to Welch’s crypto experiment. Basically, memecoins serve no useful purpose beyond speculation and wealth extraction. So it’s unclear why anyone would want to buy it unless they think they can make money by selling it later at a higher price. And Welch’s interview with Fortune doesn’t suggest he has any bold plans for the token.
From Fortune:
Welch says he thought of cryptocurrencies as “just a scam” and an “easy way to lose money,” but changed his mind after attending conferences. When asked what aspects of cryptocurrencies appealed to her, she responded that it was a “really good thing” and a “good way to interact with my fans.” Welch wasn’t aware of any specific benefits that memecoin holders would receive, though her manager added that they plan to have “more fan engagement with that,” without offering further details.
If you buy this coin, it’s your fault. But this is always the case in the world of cryptocurrencies.
