Haliey Welch may have embarked on one odd business venture too many.
Better known as the “Hawk Tuah Girl," Welch has cashed in on every opportunity that's risen from her moment of viral fame. While the jury's still out on her podcast and dating app, her just-released cryptocurrency can be considered a failure by almost any metric.
Welch’s memecoin HAWK launched Wednesday evening on the Solana blockchain platform, briefly surging to a market cap of $500 million before crashing to below $60 million in twenty minutes.
As of this writing, the coin has a market cap of less than $23.2 million. Although Welch insisted to Fortune that the memecoin was “not just a cash grab,” the influencer and her team are being accused of a "rug pull." This is a move in the crypto space where a coin launches with the team behind it owning a significant portion of the coin. After hyping it up, the owners sell their shares for a massive profit while tanking the value for other coinholders.
Welch claimed on X that her team “hasn’t sold one token.” This was contradicted by another user, who showed massive sales of the coin around the time of the launch.
“Does she know the blockchain is public?” an X user commented under her tweet. Another user less subtly suggested that Welch should “talk tuah lawyer.”
