Hunter Biden's LAPTOP Meme Coin Crashes Nearly 99 Percent Hours After Launch
Hunter Biden launched a meme coin called LAPTOP on Wednesday, and it did exactly what nearly every celebrity meme coin before it has done: rip on launch, then collapse.
THE LAUNCH AND THE CRASH
The token, ticker $LAPTOP, went live on Coinbase's Base network on September 9. LAPTOP hit a $190.81 peak within minutes of launching on Base, then shed roughly 99% as thin liquidity met a wave of selling. Thin float made the early prints look absurd: one on-chain tracker reported the token's market capitalisation "briefly surged to $314.9 billion after listing" before falling under $8 billion, a distortion typical of a low-float token opening against almost no real liquidity.
By the afternoon, the coin had settled into the low single digits. By afternoon, the token had stabilized in the low single digits, changing hands around $1.97, down nearly 99% from its intraday high, enough for a $780 million market capitalization. The winners and losers were split almost entirely by speed. One wallet pulled $249,800 from Binance ahead of launch, bought 9,124 LAPTOP, then sold most of the position minutes later for roughly $1.18 million. Another trader was not so lucky: a trader spent about $200,000 to buy 919 LAPTOP near $218 a token, a position worth less than $3,000 an hour later.
THE TOKENOMICS
LAPTOP launched with a supply of one billion tokens. Twenty percent of the tokens were set to go out in two batches to holders who lost money on Trump's TRUMP meme coin, as well as subscribers to Biden's Substack. Biden and the project's founders took 30 percent of the supply, locked for six months and released over more than two years. Another 30 percent was tied to a deflationary "event burn" triggered by 30 real-world outcomes, including whether a Democrat wins the 2028 presidential election, Bitcoin hits a new all-time high, or LAPTOP's valuation flips TRUMP's.
WHY THIS ISN'T JUST ANOTHER RUG
The pitch was explicitly built as a counter-punch to Trump. Biden framed the coin as a rebuke of the president's own meme coin venture, which Trump and First Lady Melania Trump launched in advance of his return to office in January 2025, reaping $1 billion in gains while most investors lost money. Reserving a fifth of the LAPTOP supply for wallets that lost money on TRUMP was the joke and the pitch at once: a rug pull dressed up as restitution for a previous rug pull.
The irony is that it changed nothing about the outcome. Crypto traders saw it coming before the token even launched, and the reception was hostile enough that Kraken deleted a promotional post and Coinbase's Base app team distanced itself from the project. A coin built to mock a presidential rug pull produced the same chart, the same snipers, and the same wallets left holding worthless tokens.
Two presidential families have now launched tokens that spiked on name recognition and crashed on thin liquidity, and both proved the same point: a coin's political branding is not a reason to buy it, and it never was.
This story comes from the Simply Bitcoin Live show. Watch the full episode.
