The story of how a viral joke became a cryptocurrency scam
A memecoin, like most cryptocurrencies, has no inherent value. It is created to represent an internet meme, and its value is tied very loosely to that meme’s popularity; you could think of it as like owning stock in, say, a knock-knock joke. The most famous memecoin is Dogecoin, which was boosted by Elon Musk and refers to an internet-famous dog.
More recently, people have fixated on a coin called Hawk, as in “Hawk Tuah,” the meme of the year. The coin was created by a team of crypto people and by Haliey Welch, the cute, blond 22-year-old woman who brought us that phrase over the summer. You may know this part of the story: In June, a man-on-the-street interviewer approached Welch, out on the town in Nashville, and asked her, “What’s one move in bed that makes a man go crazy every time?” She replied with perfect comedic timing, in a thick Tennessee accent: “You gotta give ’em that hawk tuah and spit on that thang.” This was very funny and went viral on TikTok and elsewhere. (Bryce Harper, the married and Mormon first baseman for the Philadelphia Phillies, imitated it on national television.) In the months that followed, Welch built an online brand as a relatable country girl turned “queen of memes,” selling trucker hats, meeting Shaq, launching an app named after her boyfriend, appearing in a bit on Jimmy Kimmel Live, and so on.
Now she’s in hot water because Hawk’s value went almost immediately to pennies—but not before some insiders were able to turn a quick profit. In an effort to quell the outrage, Welch and the people she had worked with on the coin hosted a live broadcast on X in early December. Welch made a short, chipper statement at the beginning, and then an assortment of men talked for nearly an hour. The first, a crypto-world figure who went by Doc Hollywood on X but has since wiped his account, ranted at listeners, challenging them to consider whether they truly understood the importance of Hawk. “Hawk Tuah is a cultural meme that everyone knows here in America,” he said. “So, if you want to be part of this meme community—dope.” Welch piped up near the end of the stream simply to tell everyone that she was going to bed. “Anyhoo,” she said, “I’ll see you guys tomorrow.”
But she didn’t reappear the next day. Instead, she vanished from the internet for weeks. She stopped releasing new episodes of her podcast, Talk Tuah (great name), and was quiet even as some of the other people involved in the coin made public statements about its spectacular failure. Then, news broke last week that a handful of people would attempt to sue her foundation (listed in the complaint as the Tuah the Moon Foundation) and various other parties, and Welch published a statement. “I am fully cooperating with and am committed to assisting the legal team representing the individuals impacted, as well as to help uncover the truth, hold the responsible parties accountable, and resolve this matter,” she wrote on X on Friday.
The people around her talked about the coin as a “community-building tool” and “a movement.” It was a fake currency that was artificially tied to a brief (and crass) display of charisma that took place months ago. The notion that the online-creator economy could somehow transmogrify this incident into profit for a whole “community” of strangers—that those strangers had come together around the meme in some meaningful way, and that it would be able to change all of their lives—is magical thinking that has to be unique to our times.
The original Hawk Tuah joke was good, but it was such a slim piece of IP. How much could really be milked out of something like that? It was just a moment, hardly anything. Yet it was inescapable. There was so much Hawk Tuah this year. How much of it was real? As it turns out: not as much as it seems.
The way Welch has told the story on her podcast, she initially spent weeks hiding from the Hawk Tuah meme, barricaded in her bedroom, streaming rom-coms. She was embarrassed by the joke, which she had told while drunk, and horrified by the number of people who had seen it. A friend persuaded her to come out of her room only because other people were profiting off her—selling bootleg merch and getting views on their own videos that used the clip. It would be silly not to get her own piece of the pie, especially because the pie might soon be gone. By July, she was everywhere.
I became more interested in Welch in August, when she threw out the first pitch at a New York Mets game. She was there to raise money for an organization that gives service dogs to disabled veterans, and of course did not make any reference to oral sex. But people were furious nonetheless.
