The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission will not be spitting on that thang.
After months of investigation into “Hawk Tuah girl” Haliey Welch‘s disastrous $HAWK crypto launch, the SEC has closed the case without finding her at fault, and without pursuing any sanctions or fines, TMZ reports.
As you probably remember, Welch skyrocketed to virality on TikTok last year after dropping her NSFW slogan during a street interview. She parlayed her more-than-15-minutes into a merch line, a podcast, and finally a cryptocurrency, which is where things went downhill.
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Coffeezilla has a thorough breakdown of the whole situation here, but the tl;dr is that from the outside, this appeared to be a fairly typical creator/celebrity coin rugpull, where only the coin’s originators and early investors profited.
When $HAWK launched Dec. 4, its market cap surged to $490 million. Minutes later, it collapsed, losing 93% of its value. As CCN writes, 97% of $HAWK’s total coin supply was controlled by just 10 wallets, and 53% of the coin’s early investors sold all or part of their token shares immediately after $HAWK’s debut. Not long after that fiasco, the SEC got involved.
Welch later said she was misled about what the coin would be, and that it was “supposed to be done the right way.” She’d also intended for half the money generated by $HAWK to go to charity.
“That’s why I agreed to do it,” she told FaZe Banks in a leaked episode of her podcast. “It was brought up to be a positive thing.”
Welch went radio silent in December 2024, and recently reemerged with a cheeky video nodding to rumors that she’d died, was pregnant, or was in jail:
@hay_welchWhat’d I miss?♬ original sound – Hay_welch
Now, it doesn’t appear the SEC concluded whether or not $HAWK was a rugpull. We also don’t know if it’s going after anyone else involved in the coin’s development and debut. And, finally, we don’t know if there will be any making whole for the people who lost hundreds or thousands of dollars on $HAWK. (Considering the track record for crypto scam reparations, we’re thinking probably not.) What we do know is that, according to Welch and her lawyer, she’s not in any trouble.
Attorney James Sallah told TMZ the SEC “closed the investigation without making any findings against, or seeking any monetary sanctions from, Haliey.”
He added that because the SEC didn’t bring any action against her, “there are no restrictions on what she can do in regards to crypto or securities in the future.”
In her own statement, Welch added, “For the past few months, I’ve been cooperating with the authorities and attorneys, and finally, that work is complete.”
With the SEC deciding she’s not at fault, it seems Welch is set to get back into content. Per Dexerto, she’s planning production for a documentary, of course called DocTuah, which will tell the story of her unexpected fame.
