Fame is a mighty fickle thing. One minute you’re an internet sensation for the way you drunkenly described your preferred method of beginning a blowjob; the next, you’re under fire for a cryptocurrency scam. If Hawk Tuah—Hailey Welch—has taught us anything, it’s how not to stay relevant. Because her dating app clearly isn’t giving her enough attention, the internet sensation recently launched Hawkcoin and watched it rise in value… only to experience a 95% collapse almost immediately, prompting raised eyebrows from investors.
Hailey Welch’s cryptocurrency venture, aptly named Hawkcoin ($HAWK), launched late Wednesday evening. It soon hit a $490 million peak market cap—then the other shoe dropped, and its value plummeted. Like, REALLY plummeted. Hawkcoin’s market cap now sits at just $14,881.90 as of this writing. That is… not a small difference in numbers, and it’s resulted in quite the scandal for Welch. Allegations of insider trading and accusations of being a pump-and-dump scheme are flying left and right—and there may be something to those claims. Critics and platforms like Bubblemaps have discovered that insider wallets seem to have controlled most of the coin’s supply. Welch claims that no team members or influencers sold tokens, but here we all are. Investors aren’t exactly thrilled to discover that the real ‘hawks’ here seem to be the ones circling their wallets.
We’re going to pause the crypto-chat here for a minute because… I’m sorry. Didn’t Hawk Tuah just launch a dating app? Is she not seeing the kind of attention she needed from her brand-new app, so she had to dive headfirst into a dumpster-fire crypto endeavor? Pookie Tools, her dating app, uses AI to help users strike their ideal match. So Welch seems determined to touch all the internet’s proverbial “hot stoves” that concerned citizens have been warning people about. Maybe the app is supposed to be a safety net for when her crypto venture inevitably fails? Who knows.
Viral fame isn’t exactly a solid foundation for building a business. Memes come and go every day. Trying to construct what is already seen as a sketchy business idea on the shaky ground of fleeting internet fame is rarely going to end well—especially when obscene sums of money are involved. Welch’s attempts to capitalize on her viral moment have backfired spectacularly, leaving her with angry investors contacting their lawyers as a result of her inability to simply move on.
Alas, poor Hawkcoin. It had promise. Almost. Let it stand as a cautionary tale for would-be meme stars looking for ways to hold on to the fleeting fame that comes with being funny on the internet. As for Hailey Welch, do you think she’ll get the message this time—that the populace is swiping left on their patience with her attempts to stay at the forefront of public discourse? Probably not. But watching the spiral sure is fun.
