Viral influencer and podcast host Haliey “Hawk Tuah Girl” Welch’s crypto coin, launched yesterday, has already crashed, leading some to speculate that the memecoin was a pump-and-dump scheme. Welch has denied this and claimed everything was fine.

Back in June 2024, a video was posted asking Welch, “What’s one move in bed that drives a man crazy every time?” Her answer: “You gotta give them the ‘Hawk Tuah’ and spit on that thing ” went viral online and quickly became a popular meme. It also led to a lot of discussion. Then, months after the viral video faded from most people’s memories, Welch announced she would be doing a podcast on Jake Paul’s Sports Betting Network. And in the process, she also announced a crypto coin called Hawkcoin that fans could buy and invest in. Predictably, that went badly.

As Web3IsGoingGreat and CoinTelegraph report, Welch’s Hawkcoin was a disaster. The memecoin was launched on December 4th and quickly reached a total market cap of $490 million. Just a few hours later, the coin’s value had plummeted as people began selling it en masse. As of this writing, Hawkcoin’s market value is around $28 million, down almost 95 percent. Yikes.

Such a rapid decline has some people speculating that Welch and her team may have intentionally inflated the coin by driving up its value and then letting it fall at its peak, making a lot of money in the process. Welch has denied this, saying that she and her team did not inflate the coin’s value and blamed snipers for the crash. (These are investors who jump in the moment a coin becomes available to buy, grab a ton, and sell them as quickly as possible to make a profit before a crash.)

“The team did not sell a single token and not 1 KOL received 1 free token,” Welch said in a post on Twitter. “We tried to stop snipers as much as possible by charging heavily at the start of launch on Meteora.”

Meanwhile, data seems to indicate that someone traded a $1.4 million worth of MOODENG coin (based on the Hippo coin that the internet loved for a few weeks) for Hawkcoin and apparently lost most of it , after trying to trade back for the Hippo Coin. The future sucks, but at least some rich people are losing in the saddest way possible.

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