Current Affairs Security

Hunter Biden's LAPTOP Memecoin Tanked 98% in an Hour. Of Course It Did.

2026-09-10

Wednesday brought us Hunter Biden's memecoin debut: LAPTOP, launched on Coinbase's Base layer-2, designed to satirize the laptop controversy that's dogged him since 2019. It was, in the strictest sense, a launch. Everything else was textbook catastrophe.

The token hit $190.81 within two minutes of open at 8 a.m. ET. The math was delicious: $144 billion implied valuation against $48,000 in actual liquidity. Imagine a concert venue that can seat 50,000 but somehow claims to have sold 14 million tickets. Within an hour, LAPTOP had shed 98% of its value, bottoming at $3.70. One trader had withdrawn $250,000 specifically for launch day, bought 919 tokens at $218 each, and watched that position evaporate to $3,000. Total first-hour volume: roughly $19 million across 314 trading pairs.

This wasn't new. Trump's TRUMP memecoin and Melania's equivalent had already run the same playbook: launch euphoria, retail massacre, connected insiders banking profits on the way down. LAPTOP's designers knew this. They locked founder allocations (30% of 1 billion tokens) for six months, vesting over 24 months afterward. They also airdropped 2% to wallets that lost money on TRUMP—a nice political jab—though it didn't stop the bleeding.

Hunter justified it all via X post, calling the token a symbol of "resilience, redemption and recovery." He also explicitly warned people not to expect him or others to artificially inflate the price, admitted memecoins are dodgy, and called Trump's World Liberty Financial venture a "grift." The irony: Biden had spent months publicly attacking Trump for exactly that—political influence, centralized control, crypto grifting. Then he launched his own political memecoin with founder allocations and explicit political branding.

The tokenomics were baroque. Beyond the 30% founder lock, another 30% tied to Polymarket predictions (Democrat 2028 win, Bitcoin ATH, LAPTOP outpacing TRUMP). Tokens burn if those events happen, go to charity if they don't. Another 10% for liquidity and ops, 5% to foundation, 5% to permanent charity. Day one: 10% airdrop split between TRUMP-loss wallets (2%) and Hunter's Substack subscribers (8%).

Coffeezilla called it a shitcoin before launch and told people not to buy. Bubblemaps found that roughly 80% of first-hour traders lost money. Base founder Jesse Pollak said on X that LAPTOP had approached Coinbase's team, but the platform made a "conscious decision" not to help with design or promotion. That's not quite an endorsement.

As of writing, LAPTOP trades far below launch prices. Most retail participants have been erased. The questions now are the ones that always haunt these things: What's the actual use case? Who's left holding it? And how many times do we need to watch this exact collapse before the regulatory response shows up?

Biden didn't respond to Cointelegraph before publication. The memecoin's future—functioning protocol, investment vehicle, or elaborate political statement—remains completely unclear.

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