The Hawk Tuah Meme Coin Debacle Explained

Cirrkus
Hailey Welch of Hawk Tuah fame

Getty Image / Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu

Hailey Welch of ‘Hawk Tuah’ fame entered the cryptocurrency world this week with the launch of a HAWK Tuah meme coin and there was and continues to be drama surrounding it. In the hours after the launch, irregular trading patterns led many people to cry foul with figures like Coffeezilla calling out Hailey Welch over the Hawk Tuah meme coin.

For the folks out there who are interested in this story but aren’t at all up-to-date on the Hailey Welch / Hawk Tuah world, this is for you. I wanted this article to be a quick explainer on the latest meme coin debacle so let’s get to it.

Explaining The Hawk Tuah Meme Coin Debacle

So… On Wednesday, December 4th, Hailey Welch launched the $HAWK Tuah meme coin. She promoted the coin on her own social media channels and that can be seen here:

Shortly after the launch, people started to cry foul. X user @BentoBoiNFT breaks down the series of events pretty well in his video on X. The gist is, approximately 96% of the Hawk Tuah meme coin supply was held by one cluster of accounts. It appears as if they made $2 million in 10 minutes by buying/selling fast while Hailey Welch was promoting the coin on her socials.

Full stop, we haven’t even taken a moment to appreciate how insane it is that this girl who became famous after a random street interview has reached a point of fame where she is able to launch her own meme coin after the success of her ‘Talk Tuah’ podcast… This is all surreal.

How Popular Was Hailey Welch’s Meme Coin At Launch?

In the aforementioned video, he goes on to claim that “Hailey Welch pumped the coin to $500 million and retraced it to $90 million.” That is based off X posts from BlockNews who shared screenshots of the coin’s volatility and trading. Though, aside from Hailey posting about the $HAWK on her social media it is unclear what role she directly played in the coin rapidly gaining/losing value.

24 hours later, CoinMarketCap‘s current tracker has the $HAWK Tuah meme coin with a 24 hour trading volume of $27.69 million. That is A LOT of money exchanging hands for a silly meme coin whose value at the exact moment of writing this is only $0.004520.

And where people started to cry foul is in posts like this:

As Hailey Welch was promoting her Hawk Tuah meme coin, the people holding the vast majority of it were actively selling and believed to have made $2 million in 10 minutes amongst all of the volatility. For anyone wondering if they are doing this for nefarious reasons, Hailey Welch’s manager Jonnie Forster previously told Fortune “we don’t want to break securities laws, We would say that we’re almost, like, tokenizing, in a sense, Hailey’s fan base.”

Flash forward 24 hours and at least one crypto trader is sharing screenshots claiming to have filed a complaint with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. And there was a large ‘Spaces’ on X last night where big names like Coffeezilla called out the meme coin as a trap.

For her part, Hailey Welch appears to not have been acting in bad faith. Hailey shared a message on X that her team has not sold any of the Hawk Tuah meme coin tokens. That message though has received a Community Notes update claiming otherwise.

What happens next, nobody knows. This meme coin launch has picked up enough attention for regulators to take notice. There will surely be answers in the coming days about who knew what and if this was a classic ‘pumping and dumping’ scheme or not. And ultimately, she is the face of this meme coin. It is named in her honor and marketed to her followers.

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