Somehow, the Hawk Tuah crypto launch did not go well
[html]You ever read a series of words and immediately feel the whole left side of your body go numb?
A woman whose primary claim to fame was an enthusiastic off-the-cuff endorsement of the use of saliva in oral se* is now being accused of possible insider trading—a clear indicator that, as we've been warning for years, reality is no longer as real as it previously seemed. Specifically, Hailey Welch, known to the internet as the Hawk Tuah girl—and can we just take a moment and appreciate how, in a fractured and divided nation, we all settled co*fortably on a spelling for that phrase in just five minutes?—is now being accused of running her crypto launch in a way more scuzzy than other, more traditionally scuzzy crypto launches you might be familiar with.
Specifically, Welch is being accused of putting her face on a $HAWK crypto coin that has been accused of being a so-called "rug pull," with Welch using her endorsement of the coin to rapidly inflate its value, only for "snipers" to buy up most of the supply, sell it at massive profit, and then tank the value for suckers left holding the bag. Rolling Stone reports that investors in the currency have already begun filing co*plaints with the SEC, even as Welch and her team have used social media to attempt to quiet concerns that they were participating in some kind of scam. (Not very successfully; a Spaces conversation between Welch, the actual crypto people, and the public reportedly devolved into a multi-hour interrogation.)
The important thing here, obviously, is that a lot of probably very serious financial trading people—morale already deeply eroded by the whole Doge of it all—have now, presumably, had to say the phrase "Hawk Tuah" to each other at least once over the last 24 hours. But there are also a lot of questions about how much responsibility Welch has for agreeing to serve as the face for the currency, whether the scheme inordinately targeted crypto newbies brought in from her fandom, and what kind of legal consequences anyone involved might face. All of which have deep implications for the future of celebrity, finance, morality, etc., except we've now been reading crypto news and articles for like the last hour—did you know, right now, there's apparently a "revenge coin" called $TUAH that's having its value inflated out of spite against Welch and her collaborators?—and now we can't remember vowels anymore, s w'r gng t hv to pll th plg rght thr.
[/html]
Source: Somehow, the Hawk Tuah crypto launch did not go well (http://ht**://www.avclub.c**/somehow-the-hawk-tuah-crypto-launch-did-not-go-well)