Viral influencer Haliey Welch has lately launched her personal meme-inspired cryptocurrency known as Hawk Tuah ($HAWK) on the Solana community, however the launch was mired in controversy because it noticed a fast pump earlier than insiders seemingly dumped their holdings, resulting in a correction of over 90%.
Based on market knowledge, the rice of Welch’s meme-inspired cryptocurrency surged to a excessive of 0.049 SOL per token, earlier than rapidly plunged to round 0.0035 SOL per token on the time of writing. At its peak, the cryptocurrency’s market capitalization hit $490 million, earlier than it plunged to little over $35 million in line with knowledge from Dexscreener.
Knowledge from Bubblemaps means that insiders held round 97.5% of the cryptocurrency’s provide and rapidly offered them available on the market as quickly as its market capitalization began rising, resulting in the large value plunge.
Responding to the controversy and rug pull allegations, Welch mentioned on social media that the crew behind the challenge didn’t promote any tokens, and that key opinion leaders (KOLs) hadn’t obtained a single free token. Welch’s crew advised that the crew had a ten% allocation locked for one yr and vested for 3 years, whereas the remainder of the tokens “are distributed into the completely different wallets as in line with the tokenomics.”
The crew added that it seeded 0.3% of the tokens to a liquidity pool on Solana’s main decentralized change Radium for liquidity, whereas 3% have been seeded right into a Meteora liquidity pool and burned.
The crew justified it added excessive charges at launch in a bid to stop token snipers, however knowledge reveals that some wallets did handle to snipe HAWK seconds after it was launched, buying giant parts of its provide earlier than promoting it.
A number of customers on the microblogging platform X (previously often known as Twitter) reported vital losses from investments within the meme-inspired cryptocurrency, with one person sharing a screenshot of their pockets revealing they misplaced $43,000 within the token.
Numerous customers reported submitting stories with the U.S. Securities and Change Fee (SEC) towards Hailey Welch and the crew behind the challenge “for rigging traders.”
Featured picture by way of Unsplash.