Hunter Biden's LAPTOP: The Memecoin That Lost 98% in Its First Hour

At eight o'clock on a Wednesday morning in New York, 9 September 2026, a digital token named after the most argued-over laptop in American politics went on sale. Two minutes later, on paper, the whole thing was valued at well over $100 billion. Within the hour it had lost 98% of that.

The token was LAPTOP, and the man behind it was Hunter Biden, the 56-year-old son of former President Joe Biden. It is a memecoin: a digital token with no company, no earnings and no assets behind it, traded purely on attention, closer to a collectible trading card than a share. The name is a joke at his own expense. The laptop he left at a Delaware repair shop in April 2019 was later taken by the FBI, and three weeks before the 2020 election the New York Post published emails from it about his foreign business dealings, along with pictures from his years of drug addiction. "They turned laptop into a weapon. I turned it into a token," Biden wrote on X the day before launch.

Nineteen days on, on 28 September, one LAPTOP costs about 8 cents. The data company CoinGecko records the top at $199.51, which makes the fall 99.96%. The coins in circulation are worth about $28 million in total. According to the blockchain analytics firm Bubblemaps, about 80% of the more than 15,000 wallets (crypto accounts) that traded LAPTOP on launch day lost money.

©CMZ chart. Data: GeckoTerminal

The peak almost nobody got

Every tracker agrees the price went vertical. None agree how high. CoinDesk reported a top of $190.81 two minutes in. CoinGecko's record is $199.51 at 8:09am. GeckoTerminal's minute-by-minute record of the main trading pool shows single trades as high as $338.83. The analytics firm Arkham put the paper value of all one billion tokens at about $144 billion at one moment, and the news site The Block reported a market value of $110 billion.

The reason is how the coin trades. A share on the New York Stock Exchange gets its price from an order book, thousands of buyers and sellers queuing at different prices. LAPTOP, like most new tokens, trades in a liquidity pool instead: a pot holding tokens and dollars, run by code that sets the price from the ratio between the two. Buy tokens out of the pot and the price rises. The smaller the pot, the more each purchase moves it. Arkham found the pool held about $48,000 when the valuation touched $144 billion. Biden later said that for the first 30 seconds it held $5,000.

So the peak was a real trade but not a real price. It is the equivalent of a thinly traded penny stock printing one trade at fifty times the previous close: a few buyers paid it, but nobody with a meaningful stake could have sold there. Among the first buyers were "sniper bots", automated programs that watch for new pools and buy in their first seconds. An hour after the open the price was $4.77, CoinDesk reported, and the pool held $2.5 million. That is the first figure at which real money could change hands in size, and by then 98% of the headline value had gone.

©CMZ chart. Data: GeckoTerminal

How the coin was built

LAPTOP was issued by the Phoenix Veritas Foundation on Base, a blockchain network built by the US exchange Coinbase. There are one billion tokens. The founders, Biden among them, hold 30%, locked for six months and then released over two years, much like the lock-up that stops company insiders selling shares after a stock market listing. Another 20% goes out as airdrops, crypto's word for free handouts: at launch, 2% to wallets that had lost money on Donald Trump's TRUMP memecoin and 8% to subscribers of Biden's Substack newsletter, "Where's Hunter?".

A further 30% is tied to 30 public predictions, among them Trump being impeached during his term, the Democrats taking the House or the Senate in 2026, a Democrat winning the White House in 2028 and LAPTOP overtaking TRUMP in value. If a prediction comes true, its tokens are burned, meaning permanently destroyed, as a company might cancel shares it buys back. If not, they go to charity. The rest covers trading liquidity (10%), running costs (5%) and 50 million tokens pledged to charity regardless.

Biden set out his terms in advance. "You should not expect me or anyone else to make this token more valuable for you," he wrote. He called Trump's coin a "grift". TRUMP launched in January 2025, peaked at $73.43 and now trades at $2.05 on CoinGecko, down 97%.

The launch drew fire before it began. The exchange Kraken deleted a promotional post after complaints from traders. Andrew Callaghan, the host of the video channel Channel 5, whose mailing list was among the airdrop recipients, told The Wall Street Journal that "Channel 5 does not consider crypto a legitimate investment." Jesse Pollak, who leads Base, said there was no partnership and that Base had made a "conscious decision" not to help design or promote the token.

What the blockchain shows

Every token movement is public, and Arkham published what it saw. A multisig wallet, one that needs several people to sign off, like a company account needing two signatures, tagged as the project's, received 100 million tokens a week before launch and has since moved out about 42.5 million. Four days before launch, 15.5 million tokens went through an intermediary address to GSR, a market maker: a firm paid to keep buying and selling so there is always a price, like a specialist on a stock exchange floor. GSR has been moving them into the market since. Another market maker, Wintermute, held about 1.8 million. The largest single early transfer, 14.5 million tokens, went to an unidentified wallet two hours before trading opened.

Those records do not show whether the tokens that moved were sold, paid into trading pools or handed to airdrop claimants. The foundation says the founders' 30% is locked at Coinbase Custody, and none of the analysis published by Arkham or Bubblemaps has shown it being sold.

Bubblemaps called the launch a "bloodbath". Two wallets lost between $100,000 and $1 million, about 100 lost more than $10,000, about 700 more than $1,000, and around 11,000 lost smaller sums.

©CMZ chart. Data: Bubblemaps

What Biden said

X suspended the project's official account hours after the crash. On Thursday the foundation answered on the blogging site Medium: the market maker's opening liquidity was too thin for the demand, the pool opened at 5 cents a token and became "a target for predatory sniper bots." It said there had been no presale and no allocations to investors or influencers, and that it would pay 4 million tokens into pools on Aerodrome, the trading venue on Base where the main pool sits.

Biden wrote on X: "I, personally, have not made a single dollar." On Friday he posted a video. The market maker, he said, had put in only $5,000 of liquidity "and the demand was through the roof." He took the blame: "At the end of the day, it's my responsibility." He added: "I am in this to the end 100%, and I promise you that we're gonna make it right." He did not say whether buyers would be compensated.

Critics pointed out that Biden had attacked Trump's crypto businesses as corruption and was now in the same market. Eric Trump, the president's son and a co-founder of the family's crypto company World Liberty Financial, posted a screenshot of the crash with one line: "Hunter should go back to painting."

Where it stands

The slide kept going: about 30 cents by 14 September, as Forbes reported, a record low of 6.5 cents on 24 September, and 8 cents now. The blockchain explorer Basescan lists about 33,800 wallets holding LAPTOP. One oddity stands out. The first trade in the main pool, per GeckoTerminal, was at about 8 cents, so anyone who bought at that very first trade and still holds is roughly level. Almost everyone who bought after it is not.