哈莉·韦尔奇和 Hawk Tuah Memecoin 崩溃

一个病毒式笑话如何变成加密货币骗局的故事

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.

与大多数加密货币一样，模因币没有内在价值。它是为了代表互联网模因而创建的，其价值与该模因的受欢迎程度非常松散地联系在一起；你可以把它想象成拥有股票，比如说，一个敲门笑话。最著名的模因币是狗狗币，它是由埃隆·马斯克推动的，指的是一只互联网上著名的狗。

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.

最近，人们开始关注一种名为 Hawk 的硬币，就像当年的模因“Hawk Tuah”一样。该币是由一群加密货币人士和 Haliey Welch 创建的，她是一位可爱的金发 22 岁女性，她在夏天给我们带来了这句话。你可能知道故事的这一部分：六月，一位街头采访者在纳什维尔小镇上找到韦尔奇，问她：“床上的什么动作每次都会让男人发疯？ ”她以完美的喜剧时机回答，带着浓重的田纳西口音：“你必须给他们那个鹰图阿，然后吐在那张唐装上。”这非常有趣，并在 TikTok 和其他地方疯传。 （布莱斯·哈珀 (Bryce Harper)，费城费城人队 (Philadelphia Phillies) 队的已婚摩门一垒手，在国家电视台上模仿了这一做法。）在接下来的几个月里，韦尔奇建立了一个在线品牌，将一个亲切的乡村女孩变成了“模因女王”，销售卡车司机帽子，满足沙克（Shaq）推出了一款以她男朋友命名的应用程序，在吉米金梅尔现场（Jimmy Kimmel Live）中露面，等等。

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.”

现在她陷入了困境，因为霍克的价值几乎立即跌至几美分，但在此之前，一些内部人士能够快速获利。为了平息愤怒，韦尔奇和她在代币上的合作者于 12 月初在 X 上举办了一场现场直播。韦尔奇一开始发表了简短而轻松的声明，然后各种各样的人谈论了近一个小时。第一个是一位加密世界人物，他在 X 上被称为 Doc Hollywood，但后来删除了自己的账户，他向听众咆哮，挑战他们是否真正理解 Hawk 的重要性。 “Hawk Tuah 是美国人人皆知的文化模因，”他说。 “所以，如果你想成为这个模因社区的一部分——那就太棒了。”韦尔奇在溪流尽头附近大声喊道，只是为了告诉大家她要去睡觉了。 “无论如何，”她说，“明天见。”

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.

但第二天她就没有再出现。相反，她从互联网上消失了几周。她停止发布播客 Talk Tuah（伟大的名字）的新剧集，并且保持沉默，尽管其他一些参与该代币的人公开声明其惨败。然后，上周有消息称，少数人将试图起诉她的基金会（在起诉书中被列为 Tuah the Moon 基金会）和其他各方，韦尔奇发表了一份声明。她周五在 X 上写道：“我将全力配合并致力于协助代表受影响个人的法律团队，并帮助揭露真相、追究责任方责任并解决此事。”

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.

她周围的人将硬币视为“社区建设工具”和“一场运动”。这是一种假货币，人为地与几个月前发生的短暂（且粗俗）的魅力展示联系在一起。网络创作者经济可以以某种方式将这一事件转化为整个陌生人“社区”的利润——这些陌生人以某种有意义的方式围绕着模因聚集在一起，这将能够改变他们所有人的生活——这是我们这个时代独有的神奇思维。

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.

Hawk Tuah 最初的笑话很好，但它是一个非常薄弱的​​ IP。这样的东西到底能榨取多少？这只是一瞬间，几乎没有什么。但这是不可避免的。今年有很多 Hawk Tuah。其中有多少是真实的？事实证明：并不像看起来那么多。

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.

正如韦尔奇在她的播客上讲述这个故事的方式一样，她最初花了数周时间躲在自己的卧室里，躲在霍克·图阿迷因中，观看浪漫喜剧。她对自己在喝醉时讲的这个笑话感到尴尬，并对看到这个笑话的人数感到震惊。一位朋友说服她离开房间，只是因为其他人从她身上获利——出售盗版商品并获得对使用该剪辑的自己视频的观看次数。如果她不分到自己的一块蛋糕，那就太愚蠢了，尤其是因为这块蛋糕可能很快就会消失。到了七月，她已经无处不在了。

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.

八月，当韦尔奇在纽约大都会队的比赛中投出第一个投球时，我对韦尔奇更加感兴趣。她去那里是为了为一个为残疾退伍军人提供服务犬的组织筹集资金，当然没有提到口交。但人们还是很愤怒。