BTC's big milestone captured global headlines. So why were my friends more interested in Hawk Tuah coin?
Updated Dec 6, 2024, 6:07 p.m. UTC Published Dec 6, 2024, 6:01 p.m. UTC
One bitcoin is worth $100,000 — a milestone that has crypto OGs in a tizzy. Donald Trump is selling DOGE T-shirts. It's a frenetic time for crypto.
But what are my non-crypto friends texting me about?
"Hawk Tuah" coin. Yep, in a very unscientific sample size of the seven friends who texted me — unsolicited — about crypto this week, six essentially asked: "What's the deal with Hawk Tuah coin?" (The seventh asked about litecoin).
That a low-level celebrity's dalliance with memecoins would dominate the groupchat's mindshare at the same time the original cryptocurrency smashed through a historic level points to a chasm between the crypto industry's perception of itself and the general public's — or at least my friends' — perception.
When HAWK launched Wednesday, it immediately rocketed up to a market capitalization of almost $500 million. Then, just as fast, it crashed below $100 million, wiping out individual investments once worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. It now fetches less than $30 million.
Betting on memecoins is never a surefire investment strategy. But there were signs that Hawk Tuah was a worse investment than most. Its launch was marred by allegations of insider dumping (which the founders deny) and a pricey swap tax that failed to stop snipers from essentially manipulating its price.
Most of the people who reached out to me didn't know this level of detail. They'd just heard the "hawk tuah" woman, Haliey Welch, had launched a memecoin and it did not go very well.
"It reinforces my previous belief that it's all nonsense," said one friend who bought bitcoin in 2020 but quickly sold. He acknowledged that bitcoin and Ethereum's ether may have "certain technological advances." And yet, "the fact that essentially anyone can create a new — potentially preferred — cryptocurrency at any point in time" boggled his mind.
To my surprise, this friend had not heard that one bitcoin was now worth $100,000, the headline story according to most everyone who works inside crypto. Most of the "normies" who reached out to me about HAWK didn't know this.
Instead, they wondered if Hawk Tuah would face legal blowback. "I can't help but feel like [Haliey] Welch is gonna be unintentionally responsible for some butterfly effect that ruins people's lives," another friend mused.
Less interesting to him was the price of bitcoin. He wasn't interested in buying before, and certainly not now. "I don't like crypto," he said.
Plenty of people don't like crypto. That may be why plenty of the people I know are so enchanted by HAWK. It reinforces all the bad, scammy notions they have for what they view as digital nonsense nickels.
Of course, that's the promise and peril of permissionless blockchains. Anyone can do anything.
Of the people who reached out to me, only one mentioned bitcoin without prompting. That friend, a gold bug, jokingly taunted me for bitcoin's failure to hold $100k for even 24 hours.
Another friend who buys cryptocurrencies through Robinhood admitted he owed no BTC. "I don't really have a reason why I have no btc," he said, "I guess im just so not mainstream."
"I'm riding litecoin to the fkn moon."
Danny Nelson
Danny is CoinDesk's managing editor for Data & Tokens. He formerly ran investigations for the Tufts Daily. At CoinDesk, his beats include (but are not limited to): federal policy, regulation, securities law, exchanges, the Solana ecosystem, smart money doing dumb things, dumb money doing smart things and tungsten cubes. He owns BTC, ETH and SOL tokens, as well as the LinksDAO NFT.
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