Hunter Biden’s LAPTOP meme token fell by 99 percent in a few hours

The controversial Hunter Biden’s meme token named LAPTOP appeared on the crypto market on Wednesday morning and immediately did what most celebrity meme coins before it have done, a classic pump and dump.

The token, named after the laptop saga from Delaware that followed Biden during the 2020 election and years after, was launched on Base, Coinbase’s Ethereum layer 2 blockchain, at 8 a.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday.

Blockchain intelligence firm Arkham reported that LAPTOP peaked at 190.81 dollars just two minutes later, a peak that implied a total supply of nearly 144 billion dollars against a liquidity pool that contained only 48,000 dollars.

That gap between the estimate and actual trading liquidity led to a collapse. Within 30 minutes, LAPTOP lost about 90 percent of its value, and by the hour mark, it was trading near 4.77 dollars.

By the afternoon, the token stabilized in low single-digit values, changing hands around 1.97 dollars, nearly 99 percent less than its peak, but it still experienced spikes from double-digit values in some brief intervals as weak trading kept the price at an upward level. This was enough for a market capitalization of 780 million dollars and a total valuation of 2.2 billion dollars, placing it among the top 100 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization.

Blockchain trackers monitored both sides of the trade in real-time. Those who disposed of their holdings as quickly as possible profited from the launch. One wallet withdrew 249,800 dollars from Binance before the launch, bought 9,124 LAPTOPs, and then sold most of the position a few minutes later for about 1.18 million dollars.

Another trader was not so lucky. The trader spent about 200,000 dollars to buy 919 LAPTOPs at nearly 218 dollars per token. The ‘investment’ was worth less than 3,000 dollars an hour later, according to the same tracking. The difference between the two outcomes came down almost entirely to time measured in seconds, not minutes.

Politics and meme coins

The story of the LAPTOP launch closely mirrors what happened with the two most prominent political meme coins that appeared before it. The TRUMP token of President Donald Trump peaked at nearly 75 dollars shortly after its launch in January 2025, and now trades around 2.24 dollars, a drop of about 97 percent from its all-time high.

Nearly a million holders collectively lost an estimated 3.81 billion dollars. The Melania Trump token followed a similar path, crashing by more than 99 percent from its own peak. Biden built the LAPTOP tokenomics directly around that history, allocating part of the airdrop for wallets that lost money holding TRUMP.

This outcome had already seemed like the most likely scenario even before the launch of LAPTOP. Political and celebrity tokens reliably attract a quick first wave of buyers regardless of how the internet feels about the person behind them, but the second wave in most cases brings only losses.

Too early to say

The first hours of trading followed a pump-and-dump pattern: concentrated supply, weak liquidity, a quick spike caused by bots, and a drop after early buyers took profits. This reading corresponds to everything visible on the chart and blockchain data so far, but it is not unexpected and seems to be part of many launch events.

Just for reference, SpaceX (the world’s largest IPO) has traded below its listing price most of the time since it hit the market, meaning that most of its owners have been in the red since the IPO, and no trader who bought SPCX during the first week of its launch is currently making a profit.

Taking this into account, a token that has already fallen by nearly 99 percent from its peak has limited room for much further percentage decline, and LAPTOP’s tokenomics still has mechanisms, a six-month lockup of founder tokens, a schedule for burning tokens over 30 events, and gradual airdrop rounds, which occur over months, not hours.