Viral Hawk Tuah girl Haliey Welch faces arrest over ‘crypto scam’ — What went wrong after memecoin launch?
Viral Hawk Tuah girl Haliey Welch faces arrest over ‘crypto scam’ — Here's what went wrong after memecoin launch
The launch of a new cryptocurrency went awry on Wednesday — hitting a market capitalization of nearly $500 million before it plummeted almost immediately to $25 million. The Hawk Tuah coin — launched by viral sensation Haliey Welch — may now face possible legal action after several traders appeared to incur big losses.
$Hawk debuted on the Solana blockchain earlier this week with many lambasting Welch and her team for “one of the most miserable, horrible launches" ever seen. Accusations of insider trading have also been levelled against the influencer with CoinTelegraph claiming that around 80% to 90% of the currency was controlled by insiders, snipers—or entities that purchased significant quantities during the launch.
Welch and her team however deny the allegations and have repeatedly insisted that they did not sell any tokens. A post on X by overHere which launched the token also added that their allocation was set at 10% and “locked for 1 year and vested over 3 years”. The rest of the tokens were distributed into different wallets as per ‘tokenomics’.
“The main piece going around X is the 96% 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% was seeded into a Meteora LP and burned (300m $HAWK + 2598 $SOL = 1.2 million USD @ 20m FDV) . We also seeded 0.3% into a Raydium pool,” overHere added in an X post that was reshared by Welch.
Some critics also speculated that the coin was launched as part of a “pump and dump” scheme. There is however no clear evidence of wrong-doing at this time — and it remains uncertain whether legal action can be brought against Welch and her team based on the current scenario.
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Business NewsNewsUs NewsViral Hawk Tuah girl Haliey Welch faces arrest over ‘crypto scam’ — What went wrong after memecoin launch?
First Published:6 Dec 2024, 09:18 PM IST
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