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The memecoin-to-lawsuit pipeline claimed more victims today. In all seriousness, not to preach here, but please remember in your online communications that Haliey Welch is 22 and likely knew very little about what she was getting into prior to this crypto kerfuffle. 

Today, we’ve got the HAWK lawsuit, an all-time high in transactions, and BasementRon's Unicorn Fart Dust. Should be a good one:

HAWK memecoin draws lawsuit, but ‘Hawk Tuah’ girl not sued

A group of 12 plaintiffs filed a lawsuit against two of the creators of HAWK, a memecoin promoted by the so-called Hawk Tuah girl Haliey Welch, in the Eastern District Court of New York this morning. 

Welch is notably not party to the suit, which lists only her business partners, a launchpad and a Cayman Islands foundation as defendants. Welch became the latest celebrity to launch a Solana memecoin this year — and far from the first to have it blow up on her. 

Haliey Welch became the face of the “Hawk Tuah” meme after appearing in a man on the street social media post in Nashville this summer. Improbably, Welch turned her brief clip into a promising influencer career: her Talk Tuah podcast rose to #4 on the charts.

Welch also made some crypto ties, attending Bitcoin Nashville and appearing virtually at Korea Blockchain Week. Her X profile picture is a reference to the Mog memecoin.

In late November, a little-known company called overHere announced it had partnered with Welch to launch HAWK, a memecoin that would “redefine the crypto space.” The HAWK token is the only product listed on overHere’s website. It was founded by Clinton So, a Hong Kong resident who is one of the lawsuit’s defendants.

“We have been extremely transparent about the limited scope and extent of our involvement in the Hawk Tuah token project. We are confident that we have done nothing wrong. As for any litigation, we will let the process play out in court,” said So’s PR firm, which is called Rekt Partners, when reached for comment.

The crypto twitter personality Alex Larson Schultz, a Los Angeles resident known online as Doc Hollywood, also helped promote the launch. Some of the HAWK tokens were pre-sold and used to fund the project, the lawsuit says.

The token debuted Dec. 4 and saw its market capitalization shoot up before falling 90% all within a few hours, the suit adds. Welch, So, and Schultz initially defended the failed launch in an X space before largely disappearing from social media for the past two weeks. Welch has not posted or uploaded anywhere online since the incident.

So has already thrown Schultz under the bus for the incident: the overHere X account posted that Schultz/Doc Hollywood had full control of the token and “vanished when things got hard.” OverHere cast Welch and her team as wanting to tap “Web3’s potential” but not having the experience to do so in a savvy way.

Celebrities being taken for a ride by business partners urging them to debut hopeless projects is a time-honored tradition in crypto — just ask Caitlin Jenner. Reading between the lines, that seems to be the case here as well. Welch not being a defendant in the suit is telling in that regard. That story becomes sadder when the celebrity involved is a 22 year-old girl who just became famous overnight.

Max Burwick, whose Burwick Law firm filed the suit alongside Wolf Popper, told me the firm is “engaged in discussions” with Welch’s counsel. 

He added that the case “underscores a troubling pattern in the crypto space: the targeted exploitation of celebrity and public figures’ names to generate profit, often at the expense of everyday people.”

— Jack Kubinec

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Renaud Partners is the premier go-to-market consulting firm for early-stage Solana teams.

We’ve been deeply involved in the community since 2021, supporting some of the best known projects in the ecosystem. We help teams with their go-to-market, brand positioning, social and PR, and fundraising strategy, and we also work across other ecosystems including Monad, Base and TON.

If you're a team looking to expedite your marketing success, let’s talk: [email protected] or @rockin_renaud on telegram.

Just found a new all-time high:

Blockworks Research just dropped an overhaul of its Solana data dashboard, and it’s much more customizable for users.

So here’s Solana’s weekly transaction count, which just hit an all-time high of over 700 million last week. The two most popular programs lately, per Blockworks Research, are Raydium and pump.fun, two heavily memecoin-related platforms.

— Jack Kubinec

Brought to you by:

Renaud Partners is the premier go-to-market consulting firm for early-stage Solana teams.

We’ve been deeply involved in the community since 2021, supporting some of the best known projects in the ecosystem. We help teams with their go-to-market, brand positioning, social and PR, and fundraising strategy, and we also work across other ecosystems including Monad, Base and TON.

If you're a team looking to expedite your marketing success, let’s talk: [email protected] or @rockin_renaud on telegram.

Today, we're talking about BasementRon's Unicorn Fart Dust and how everyday feels like one step closer to a meaningless death in this fetid post-reality hellscape. According to Basement Ron, the token was intended as a tongue-in-cheek jab at crypto speculation. 48 hours later, however, it had quickly spiraled into a viral sensation, reaching an eye-popping $250+ million market cap. It is currently one of the largest memecoins on Solana, leaving even its creator bewildered at the social power of the internet.

Reactions have ranged from admiration to existential despair. "If you want to understand the lore," @tristanplays16 explained, "This video was posted by @BasementRon in January 2023. He called Bitcoin Unicorn Fart Dust back then. This is because he is a gold and silver maxi." Meanwhile, @victorsin86 insists the rise was no accident: "He campaigned to prove otherwise. Reverse psychology. He is a genius." @0xRamonos agreed on principle, stating “A Boomer said it couldn't, so [crypto twitter] showed him it could.”

@JoeLindner1 quipped, "I'm failing to see how all the morons pumping this haven't proven his point though…" while @mor3idscream summed it up with: "Bro just learned the power of memes. They never will make sense but can make you rich."

Others rallied behind BasementRon as crypto’s unlikely anti-hero. "BasementRon for chair of the Federal Reserve!" @PepeLongHaul exclaimed, adding, "I can support the dollar being backed by precious metals AND crypto, but not okay with it being backed by nothing." @FOMOCapitalLLC called him, "the best crypto dev since Satoshi."

"Just when I think the world can't be more stupid, it finds a way," @ampincivero lamented. Even though the sentiment is unlikely to hold up in the long run, these sort of run ups make it easy to see why folks like @MyWestLord believe, "the market proves it again: people don’t want tech, they want memes."

— Jeffrey Albus

A message from JJ Knegtel, co-founder and CEO of The Grid: