If you thought 2024 couldn’t get more bonkers, Hawk Tuah girl just launched a cryptocurrency. I can’t believe that was a real sentence I just wrote.

Viral sensation, Hailey Welch, has found herself in a bit of a pickle after dipping her toes into the murky waters of cryptocurrency. And by ‘dipping her toes’, we mean cannonballing into the deep end of that thang.

For those who’ve been living under a rock, Hailey shot to stardom with her response to a TikTok vox pop. She catapulted to fame with her viral “hawk tuah” sound, earning her millions of followers and leading her to start many ventures.

But apparently, having a successful podcast, merch line, and 1.8 million wasn’t enough. No, Hailey decided to test her luck in the wild west of finance by launching her own cryptocurrency, $HAWK. What in the finance bro hell is this???

Within a mere 20 minutes of its launch on December 5, $HAWK went from soaring like its namesake to plummeting real fast.

The coin’s value nosedived from a whopping $490 million to $41 million, leaving fans clutching their empty wallets and wondering if they should’ve just bought a scratchie instead.

Naturally, the internet did what it does best – lose its collective mind. Accusations of a “rug pull” started flying around instantly. One poor soul claimed they’d invested their “life savings and children’s college education fund” into $HAWK, only to see it evaporate. Okay but what do you mean you invested that much into something you found on TikTok??

In a desperate attempt to salvage her reputation, Welch and her team hosted an audio event on X Spaces (it’s basically a live stream call on X), Wednesday evening. But instead of putting out the fire, they seemed to pour petrol on it.

Welch, uncharacteristically quiet, let her crypto partners from overHere do the talking. Their vague responses and circular logic did little to quell suspicions of a scam

YouTuber and crypto journalist, Coffeezilla, was not buying the podcaster’s statement and joined the conversation to to give Hailey a grilling accusing her team of insider trading and generating over a million dollars in fees while fans got “rug pulled”.

“This is one of the most miserable, horrible launches I’ve ever seen. I’ve been tracing it on the chain for a while. You guys generated over a million dollars in fees, while your fans got rug pulled. There were snipers, but there was also insider trading directly linked to y’all’s creator accounts,” Coffeezilla said.

He has since posted a take down of the crypto currency on his YouTube which you can watch here:

Welch’s response? Silence and then a classic “anywho, I’m gonna go to bed” exit strategy when another question got asked, leaving her team to face the music. The damage control attempt was so disastrous that Welch promptly removed the recording from her X account, though it’s still available on YouTube here:

To wrap up this crypto rollercoaster, overHere, the platform behind $HAWK, released a statement on X on December 5 attempting to clear the air:

“There has been a wild amount of fud circulating, let us explain: The main piece going around @X is the 96 per centFF cluster seen on @bubblemaps which shows $HAWK tokens being sent by the deployer address (xxxx), to the related addresses, according to the tokenomics that was published.

“The other 3 per cent was seeded into a Meteora LP and burned (300m $HAWK + 2598 $SOL = 1.2 million USD @ 20m FDV). We also seeded 0.3 per cent into a Raydium pool.”

They claimed that Haliey’s team has sold “absolutely no tokens whatsoever” and that Hailey’s team has 10 per cent allocation which is locked for one year and vested over three years.

“The rest of the tokens are distributed into the different wallets as according to the tokenomics.”

They’ve invited the community to raise concerns, promising to address them. But let’s be real, this explanation is about as clear as mud to anyone who doesn’t speak fluent crypto.

Plus, while overHere attempts to explain the token distribution, their statement doesn’t account for the alleged evidence of insider trading and sniping that led to the coin’s dramatic crash.

So, what’s next for our Hawk Tuah girl? Will she be swapping her designer threads for prison orange? Or will she somehow hawk her way out of this mess? Only time will tell.

For now, it seems the only thing soaring higher than $HAWK’s initial value is the number of questions surrounding this memecoin mayhem.