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

The pipeline from viral social-media star, to podcaster, to questionable crypto launch remains robust.

12/10/24 2:06PM

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:

Hawk is live!!!

HAWKThXRcNL9ZGZKqgUXLm4W8tnRZ7U6MVdEepSutj34 pic.twitter.com/9GFgYwpeFA
— Haliey Welch (@HalieyWelchX) December 4, 2024

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.

.@espn I don’t need you. I got @ethereum_max I made more money with this crypto in the past month then I did with y’all in a year. TRUTH shall set u Free 🤪🤪 my own Bosshttps://t.co/3irnuWYve3 check it out for yourself
— Paul Pierce (@paulpierce34) May 26, 2021

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.

Sage D. Young6/16/26

Hyperliquid reclaims all-time high

HYPE, the native token powering perpetuals exchange Hyperliquid and its underlying blockchain, rebounded to reclaim its all-time high previously set at the start of the month.

Treasury firms Hyperliquid Strategies and Hyperion DeFi have also rallied as the token increased double digits in the last 24 hours to trade as high as $76.70, rising past its record price set nearly two weeks ago, according to CoinGecko. In the interim between all-time highs, HYPE pulled back to around $53.

The token has several tailwinds, the first coming from ETF flows. Since their inception in May, HYPE ETFs have yet to record negative weekly outflows, posting a cumulative total net inflow of $171.8 million, per SoSoValue.

The second comes from Hyperliquid spending basically everything it earns in fees to buy HYPE, a mechanism embedded into the protocol’s codebase.

The venue’s buyback funding mechanism is set to add a new source of yield. Validators of the network activated “AQAv2,” which means stablecoin deployers will share about 90% of reserve yield revenue on their supply within the protocol.

Around $6.1 billion of Circle’s USDC resides in Hyperliquid, per DefiLlama. Accrual begins on August 26 and the first payment is made on October 3, the network announced in its Discord channel last week.

A substantial amount of capital is riding on different positions of HYPE. In total, a move down to under $53 would result in the liquidation nearly 1.8 million HYPE worth of leveraged long positions on the on-chain perps venue, or $131.7 million, data from CoinGlass shows. For the upside, a climb above $100 results in the liquidation of more than 3 million worth of leveraged HYPE short positions, or $221.5 million.

HYPE’s rebound to all-time high comes after Michael Selig, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, defended his agency’s decision to approve regulated perpetuals, or futures contracts without expiration dates, CNBC reported on Monday.

Last month, the CFTC approved bitcoin perpetual futures trading in the US through regulated prediction markets firm Kalshi and an affiliate of centralized exchange Coinbase.

“Perps are highly likely to become lightly regulated and thus approved in the US,” said David Pakman, head of venture investments at CoinFund.

“We expect to see perps for many different types of assets, from commodities to equities,” Pakman told Sherwood News.

Yaël Bizouati-Kennedy

6/16/26

Bitcoin is “caught between flow deterioration and macro relief”

Sage D. Young6/15/26

Crypto market snaps back as sentiment lifts, with altcoins from ethereum to XRP soaring

The market capitalization of the crypto industry has jumped around $83.2 billion in the last 24 hours, with privacy-focused token Zcash and worldcoin, the native cryptocurrency of the network backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, leading market gains, jumping over 22%.

But the last 24 hours have been good across the board:

Ethereum has increased more than 9% to trade above $1,800, amid BitMine Immersion Technologies acquiring $139.2 million worth of ethereum.
XRP and solana have rebounded from multiyear lows, each rising roughly 10%.
HYPE has bounced up 12%.
Dog-based memecoins dogecoin and shiba inu have chased gains of more than 4%.

“Investors have been eager to see some positive signs around the Iranian conflict ending, coupled with hopeful outlooks around the CLARITY act, both breathing some life into assets,” Kairos Research cofounder Ian Unsworth told Sherwood News.

Simon Shockey, a crypto strategist at crypto wallet infrastructure firm Privy, said the upswing stems from several things converging. He pointed to how alt markets broadly were “very oversold” following the bug found in Zcash that shook confidence.

Friday, Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox said Anthropic didn’t find any more serious bugs with the Zcash protocol after Shielded Labs requested the AI firm run a security audit of the network with Mythos.

Shockey added that the pool of willing sellers has dwindled. “Even if structurally, AI is a much more compelling and asymmetric bet in the eyes of allocators, many of these crypto assets have simply run out of marginal sellers despite some shorter-term narrative-driven pumps. The only people left to sell at this point are the teams themselves and VCs.”

“Net-net: oversold conditions plus exhausted seller bases plus a macro backdrop that’s stabilized equals a snapback, especially in names that have real usage or community conviction behind them,” Shockey told Sherwood.

Yaël Bizouati-Kennedy

6/15/26

Bitcoin hits highest level in 2 weeks following news of Iran deal

Bitcoin crossed $66,500 Monday morning as the broad crypto market welcomed the return of a risk-on mood.