Explained: The Hawk Tuah “Rug Pull” (December 2024)

Hailey Welch — better known as the “Hawk Tuah” girl — is accused of performing a rug pull on her $HAWK token, which was launched on December 4, 2024. After a meteoric rise in value, large-scale selloffs resulted in the token’s value cratering while accounts believed to be officially associated with the project pocketed millions.

Inside the “Rug Pull”

A rug pull is when the team behind a token or other on-chain project suddenly cashes out at their users’ expense. In the case of memecoins like $HAWK, this typically involves pumping up the value of the coin by hyping it prelaunch and then selling off large numbers of tokens. While this allows the dumper to make significant profits, it causes the value of the coin to plummet by flooding the market.

In the case of $HAWK, the memecoin rocketed to a market cap of approximately $490 million within fifteen minutes of launching. Shortly after, its value collapsed by over 93%, wiping out all of these gains.

The cause of this collapse was a network of interconnected wallets selling off large quantities of $HAWK shortly after the token was publicly available for purchase. On-chain analysis found that 97% of the supply was initially held by ten wallets and distributed from there, and only 3% of the supply was available for public sale. In total, 285 investors joined the presale for the token. Of the investors, 30% quickly sold all of their tokens, and another 23% sold some. These sellers made an estimated $3 million while causing the value of the token to drop over 90%.

In a copy-pasted post on Twitter/X, Welch claimed that the team hasn’t sold any tokens or given any away to KOLs (Key Opinion Leaders). However, this post also has a reader-added note pointing out that the majority of token sellers never bought tokens and were selling ones that they were given.

The post also pointed to snipers as the cause of the issue. While the team supposedly set fees high to deter snipers, one account managed to purchase 17.5% of the supply within seconds of the launch. Later sales of the token netted them an estimated $1.3 million.

Lessons Learned from the Incident

Proving whether an incident like this is an official rug pull can be difficult. On the one hand, the project's official tokenomics allocated a substantial portion of the tokens to Welch, a community fund, and a reserve. Another 17% was “strategically allocated” for early investors and fully unlocked upon launch. Less than a quarter was intended to be accessible to the public.

This means that the $HAWK team could be blameless if the mass selloff were performed by snipers collecting the publicly available tokens and early investors selling off their “strategically allocated” tokens. Or it could have been a planned rug pull coordinated by the project team.