I, for one, am Shock Tuah’d that Haliey Welch’s crypto tanked

One of the more entertaining plotlines of 2024 has been that of Haliey Welch, better known as the “Hawk Tuah” girl. On June 11, 2024, Tim & Dee TV published a YouTube video in which they asked different women on Broadway (Nashville, not New York) what makes them “wifey material,” and Welch’s now infamous reply, delivered in thick, slow Southern drawl, made her an internet celebrity overnight. (You can watch the full video here).

Welch, who was, at the time, a minimum-wage factory worker with no social-media presence, became an overnight celebrity, with the original viral TikTok hitting 14.3 million views in a little over a month. Normally, these 15 minutes of fame flame out, with the internet masses quickly turning their attention to the next thing. What makes Welch so interesting is that six months after the initial video launched, her fame has only grown.

She now has 2.7 million Instagram followers, with her first video showing her on stage at a Zach Bryan concert in July, and she has 424,000 followers on X. That viral popularity has translated to dollars, too. By late June, she had sold more than $65,000 in merchandise; in early July, she signed with talent-management firm Penthouse; over the Fourth of July weekend, she made more than $30,000 in appearance fees in New York; in September, she signed a deal with Jake Paul’s Betr Media to launch the “Talk Tuah” podcast; and on November 14, she revealed an “AI-powered dating advice app” called Pookie Tools.

Welch’s X activity over the last couple months has also highlighted her interest in cryptocurrencies, with her tweeting memes and jokes about bitcoin’s price like “Hawktoshi Tuahmoto” and “Bit on that thang.” It was only a matter of time before the social-media star who turned a YouTube interview innuendo into a resume that included five-figure appearance fees, a Jake Paul podcast deal, and an AI-powered dating app would launch a cryptocurrency. 

And so, last week, our timelines were blessed with the Hawk Tuah coin launch video:

Anyway, consider me shocked, and I mean shocked, that the cryptocurrency spiked before immediately tanking, falling from a ~$500 million market cap to ~$23 million.

Bubblemaps, a site that tracks blockchain data, noted that 96% of the coin supply was reserved for a single cluster, suggesting that insiders were reserving most of the coins for themselves. While Welch tweeted that the “team hasn’t sold one token,” another user pointed out that someone was making hundreds of thousands of dollars selling the coin, and X users called her out for a “scam” and “rug pull.”

This isn’t the first time (and, let’s be honest, won’t be the last time) that someone with a large platform promotes a questionable cryptocurrency. Kim Kardashian and NBA Hall of Famer Paul Pierce settled with the SEC for more than $1 million each for not disclosing that they were paid to promote “EthereumMax” on social media in 2021, for example.

The playbook on this stuff is pretty straightforward: someone, who may or may not know anything about crypto, has a sizable social-media following, so a person (or group of people) approaches them and says either, “Hey, we’ll pay you to promote this cryptocurrency,” (definitely illegal if not disclosed, as was the case with EthereumMax), or “Hey, you’ll be allocated free coins in this project if you help promote it” (likely the case here with Welch. Legally ambiguous, ethically suspect).

My personal take is that I just don’t see how anyone could have bought Hawk Tuah coin and expected any outcome other than immediately losing everything. Like, this certainly wasn’t going to become some blue-chip asset that appreciated in value.

That being said, whether or not she ultimately faces legal issues, and whether or not she and her team sold any coins, Welch is going to suffer a massive reputational hit from promoting a cryptocurrency that immediately tanked. For someone whose livelihood is driven by their social-media following, a reputational hit can be fatal. Given that she’s been radio silent on X since December 4, I’d assume she knows she’s in hot water.