Another memecoin pump and dump? Shocking!
Influencer Haliey Welch, who rose to fame as the "Hawk Tuah" girl from a viral TikTok video earlier this year, launched an eponymous memecoin (HAWK) on Wednesday.
Why? We're still not entirely sure. But given what went down almost immediately, we'd be willing to hazard a guess that she was involved in a classic get-rich-quick scheme that has become all too common in a still largely unregulated industry.
At first, the market responded with glee, sending the dubious cryptocurrency soaring to a peak market cap of $490 million, as Cointelegraph reports.
But the writing was already on the wall. The price plummeted almost immediately, hovering at a cap of just $24.6 million at the time of writing, a more than 90 percent drop in just hours.
In other words, the launch bears all the hallmarks of a crypto rug pull, which has already sparked plenty of outrage on social media.
Most of them, however, took the unsurprising news as an opportunity to make jokes.
"I am a huge fan of Hawk Tuah but you took my life savings," Media Matters deputy director Madeline Peltz wrote in a sarcastic post on Bluesky.
"The hawk tuah girl turning into a crypto scammer is peak 2024 story arc that I didn’t have on my bingo card," media journalist David Leavitt quipped.
Hawk tuah margin call on that thang pic.twitter.com/0VekdTWVWO
— SwiftOnSecurity (@SwiftOnSecurity) December 5, 2024
Meanwhile, Welch denied any wrongdoing, tweeting that the "team hasn't sold one token."
"We tried to stop snipers as best we could through high fees in the start of launch on Meteora," she wrote, referring to a decentralized crypto exchange.
Despite those efforts, one crypto wallet managed to snap up 17.5 percent of the supply, roughly worth just under $1 million at the time, as Cointelegraph reports. The account then made a profit of $1.3 million by selling a whopping 135.8 million tokens in an hour and a half.
Users on X were quick to point in a community note appended to Welch's tweet that "Hailey [sic] is lying and will likely have to 'talk tuah' judge about this."
"The 'team' and insiders have actually been selling their token since launch," the note reads. "A majority have never purchased anything and have only sold the tokens they were given."
A screenshot circulating on the platform shows a number of accounts selling millions of tokens, worth immense sums of money at the time.
Since then, the official platform of the HAWK token, called overHere, defended Welch, arguing that "Haliey's Team has sold absolutely no tokens whatsoever," in a tweet. "Haliey's Team has ten percent allocation which is locked for 1 year and vested over 3 years."
"Bro, we can all see the blockchain," another account replied, echoing the general sentiment that the platform was covering up the truth.
"'Team didn't sell' but all the insiders that got multiple millions of coins without ever buying them did," another user chimed in.
Meanwhile, users on social media lamented that their extremely questionable investment fell through.
"I really lost $43k apeing in 'hawk tuah' coin," one user tweeted.
"Oh, thanks," another user wrote. "That explains how I lost $70k of my Christmas money."
Other users claimed to have already reached out to the US Securities and Exchange Commission to file a complaint.
"Just filed my report against Haliey Welch and the $HAWK team for rugging investors," one X user wrote.
Whether the regulator will decide to investigate the matter remains unclear.
But if there's one certainty, it's that Hawk Tuah's rise and fall in the crypto world left a foul taste in people's mouths.
More on memecoins: Donald Trump Seems Completely Baffled by His Own Crypto Project
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