Viral influencer and podcast host Haliey “Hawk Tuah Girl” Welch’s crypto coin, which launched yesterday, has already crashed, leading some to speculate that the memecoin was a pump and dump scheme. Welch has denied this and claimed everything is above board.
Back in June 2024, a video was posted of Welch being asked, “What’s one move in bed that makes a man go crazy every time?” Her response, “You gotta give ‘em that ‘hawk tuah’ and spit on that thang,” went viral online and quickly became a popular meme. It also led to a lot of discourse, too. Then, months after the viral video had faded from most people’s memories, Welch announced she was doing a podcast on Jake Paul’s sports betting network. And during all this, she also announced a cyrpto coin called Hawkcoin that fans would be able to buy and invest in. Predictably, this has gone poorly.
As reported by Web3IsGoingGreat and CoinTelegraph, Welch’s Hawkcoin has been a disaster. The memecoin launched on December 4 and quickly reached a total market value of $490 million. Just a few hours later, the value of the coin had crashed as people started selling en masse. As of this writing, Hawkcoin’s market value is hovering around $28 million, a nearly 95 percent drop. Yikes.
A drop that fast has some people speculating that Welch and her team could have purposely inflated the coin, pumping up its value, then dumping it at its peak and making a lot of money in the process. Welch has denied this, saying that she and her team didn’t inflate the coin’s value and blamed the crash on snipers. (These are investors who hop in the moment a coin is available to buy, grab a ton, and sell them as quickly as possible to make a profit before a crash.)
“Team hasn’t sold one token and not 1 KOL was given 1 free token,” said Welch in a post on Twitter. “We tried to stop snipers as best we could through high fee’s in the start of launch on Meteora.”
Meanwhile, data seems to indicate that someone dumped $1.4 million worth of MOODENG coin (based on the hippo the internet loved for a few weeks) for Hawkcoin and apparently lost most of it after trying to swap back to the hippo coin. The future sucks, but at least some rich people are losing in the saddest ways possible.
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