“I’m an enormous fan of Hawk Tuah, however you took my life financial savings,” wrote one X user earlier this month. That’s a sentence you most likely by no means imagined studying, not even when Haliey Welch—a.ok.a. Hawk Tuah Lady—first burst into the nationwide zeitgeist after a nine-second clip of her speaking about giving blowjobs (“you gotta give ’em that hawk tuah and spit on that thang!”) went viral this summer time. Together with her plucky, can-do angle and Dolly Parton accent, the 22-year-old from Belfast, Tennessee, parlayed her quarter-hour of fame into one thing of a enterprise empire: Quickly sufficient, she was promoting merchandise, making public appearances, and launching a preferred podcast. However the bubble might have burst along with her ill-advised foray into cryptocurrency, which price sure buyers an enormous chunk of change at greatest, and at worst, might have been legal in nature. Right here’s how Hawk Tuah Lady went from viral sensation to the recipient of an SEC grievance in report time.
After we had been first launched to Miss Hawk Tuah in June of this 12 months, she was merely an unwitting social media star on the rise. Prior to now six months, Welch has bought oodles of merchandise, been signed by administration agency The Penthouse, and launched the punnily named podcast Discuss Tuah With Haliey Welch (get it?). Produced by YouTuber turned boxer Jake Paul’s manufacturing firm, Discuss Tuah has featured an assortment of movie star friends, together with Paul himself, comic Whitney Cummings, rapper Wiz Khalifa, and Shark Tank billionaire Mark Cuban. Oh, and her grandmother, Granny Welch, got here on the pod for an episode uncomfortably titled “I Instructed Granny About Hawk Tuah.”
Discuss Tuah instantly discovered an viewers, ranking at number five on Spotify only a few weeks after its premiere—trailing The Joe Rogan Expertise however besting Alex Cooper’s Name Her Daddy. Whereas it didn’t wind up cracking Spotify’s top 10 podcasts of the year, Discuss Tuah, like its namesake, actually made an impression, and at the moment boasts 202K subscribers on YouTube.
YouTube isn’t the one place the place Welch is making an impression. Her private Instagram account has roughly 2.6 million followers, her TikTok has 1.8 million followers, and her X account has 424.5K followers. Out in the true world, Welch has continued her victory lap, following a shock visitor look at a Zach Bryan live performance with an look on Invoice Maher’s podcast. In August, she threw the ceremonial first pitch at a Mets recreation. In November, she launched a Gen Z focused courting app referred to as Pookie Instruments, which makes use of AI to assist customers (and got middling reviews).
All the things was developing roses for Hawk Tuah—that’s, till she received concerned with cryptocurrency. On December 4, Welch introduced that she was launching her personal memecoin, a Solana-based crypto coin referred to as $HAWK. OverHere, the staff that partnered with Welch to promote the memecoin, posted on X that $HAWK would “redefine the crypto space” and current a “significant step in bridging mainstream audiences with the crypto world.” In an interview with Fortune, Welch herself assured skeptics that this was “not just a cash grab” like all these different memecoins.
“$HAWK isn’t only a memecoin, it’s part of the tradition,” OverHere’s web site assures. “Haliey is utilizing her meme to unite her complete neighborhood. From: TikTok, Discuss Tuah podcast listeners, merchandise patrons, and even her charity supporters. A whole lot of hundreds of non-crypto customers might be onboarded by $HAWK as a result of Haliey is making it straightforward, enjoyable, and interesting. For those who love Haliey, you like memes. And $HAWK is the place all of it comes collectively.”
And the coin actually united people—in opposition to Welch. Shortly after $HAWK went reside, its worth spiked and hit a market cap of $490 million—spectacular, to make sure. However 20 minutes after that peak, $HAWK fell to $60 million; in just a few hours, $HAWK misplaced over 90% of its worth.
What occurred? That will depend on who you ask. Skeptics, like YouTube crypto journalist Coffeezilla, have accused Welch and her staff of participating in a “pump-and-dump” rip-off, during which they rapidly inflated the worth of $HAWK (to the tune of virtually half a billion {dollars}, thoughts you) after which instantly bought off their cash, inflicting the $HAWK’s worth to crash. (That’s the identical form of scheme Jordan Belfort perpetuated in The Wolf of Wall Avenue.) Welch’s lawyer responded to Coffeezilla, and the staff denied the pump-and-dump accusations on the time the video was posted. Welch’s lawyer additional clarified their stance to the YouTuber, stating that the proportion of internet proceeds from the allocation of tokens to Welch “wouldn’t be realized till if/when she bought them,” and out of that proportion, “she must pay her non-crypto staff too, so in actuality, she would doubtless solely maintain 3.5% of the tokens withdrawn.”
“The episode has all of the markings of a dreaded ‘rug pull’—crypto slang for a well-known rip-off the place dangerous actors hype a brand new undertaking to buyers to drive up the value. They then dump a stash they stored for themselves, main the worth of the brand new cryptocurrency to plummet,” Leo Schwartz wrote in Fortune. “They’ve turned this right into a one-day pump and dump,” mentioned Nicolas Vaiman, the founder and CEO of blockchain analyst Bubblemaps.
