LAPTOP peaked at $190.81 two minutes after launch, on $48,000 of liquidity. The design did the rest
Hunter Biden's memecoin printed a $144 billion valuation against a pool smaller than a house deposit, then lost 99 percent inside an hour. He says nobody on his side sold. The tokenomics say nobody on his side could.
Hunter Biden's LAPTOP token went live on Base at 8am ET on Wednesday. Two minutes later it traded at $190.81. An hour later it was under $4. By the afternoon, around $1.61, which Wu Blockchain puts at 99.5 percent below the high GMGN recorded ($314.94), on roughly $11.7 million of total volume.
Here is the number that explains the chart. At the peak, Arkham says, the fully diluted valuation was near $144 billion. The liquidity pool held $48,000.
LATEST: Hunter Biden's $LAPTOP memecoin hit $190.81 within two minutes of opening on Base on Wednesday, then fell as low as $3.70 inside the first hour.
@OKnightCrypto reports. t.co/6EvhKg6FVT
What $48,000 of liquidity does
A pool that small means every dollar of buying moves the price by orders of magnitude, and the first people to sell take the entire move. Decrypt traced one wallet that pulled $249,800 from Binance before launch, bought 9,124 LAPTOP, and sold minutes later for about $1.18 million. Another spent around $200,000 on 919 tokens near $218 and was holding less than $3,000 an hour later. The difference between those two people was seconds, and probably a bot.
So was this a rug pull? Not in the technical sense. The founders' 30 percent is locked for six months, vesting over two years, and the lock does not expire until March 2027. Nobody on the team sold because nobody on the team could. Biden said exactly that on Wednesday evening, and he is right.
As you may have seen, the LAPTOP memecoin saw a sharp swing in token price during its first hours of trading.
The headlines are all the same.
Token down 99%. Rug pull. Biden Crime Family. The list goes on.
This is far from the truth.
The reality is that available liquidity could not sustain the strong level of interest at launch. Technical issues coupled with predatory "snipers", who seek to beat liquidity providers to market, caused a spike in price, which has since stabilized to healthy levels.
The team's allocation is locked. Nobody on our side sold, and nobody could have. I, personally, have not made a single dollar.
I'm used to legacy news and social media trolls spinning realities to fit their own narrative.
The fully diluted valuation of the token is over $1 billion. And we're actively working on the best solutions to optimize liquidity and continue engaging my community.
We gave free tokens to those who lost on Trump's memecoin.
Somehow the media is painting that as a "failure".
This journey is far from over. We built this community for the long game, and that's exactly how we're playing it. I'm going to keep doing what I do best: ignoring the noise, and reclaiming the narrative.
But read the rest of that statement. "Available liquidity could not sustain the strong level of interest at launch." That is a description of a decision. A team that can negotiate allocations with GSR, G20 and Wintermute (15.5 million, 5 million and 2.5 million tokens respectively, 2.3 percent of supply, per on-chain analyst @ai_9684xtpa) can size a liquidity pool. It chose, or allowed, one that made a $144 billion print possible for two minutes and a 99 percent drawdown inevitable for everyone who arrived third. Whether that is negligence or intent is a question for the people who built it. From the outside, the outcome is the same.
The design, as reported
One billion tokens, per the Wall Street Journal's account relayed by Decrypt.
The burn is the exotic part. Thirty preset events decide whether that 30 percent is destroyed (a Democrat winning in 2028, a new bitcoin all-time high, LAPTOP's valuation passing TRUMP's) and unresolved events send a share to charity instead. The airdrop reserves one tranche for wallets that lost money on TRUMP.
Biden's pre-launch framing leaned on the precedent it was supposedly correcting: "With $TRUMP, nearly one million wallets have collectively lost ~$3.8B." TRUMP peaked near $75 in January 2025 and trades around $2.24, down about 97 percent. LAPTOP, a token whose stated purpose is compensating TRUMP's losers, manufactured a new set of them on day one at roughly the same ratio. Decrypt predicted this before launch. That was not clairvoyance, it was the base rate for political memecoins.
What happens now
Biden says the team is "actively working on the best solutions to optimize liquidity." We'd guess that means a second, larger pool seeded from the 20 percent foundation allocation, presented as generosity. It would help the chart and change nothing about the first hour. Our expectation is a circulating market cap under $200 million by the time the first airdrop claim window closes. The only thing that would move us off that is a burn event resolving in the token's favour before then, and none of the 30 listed can resolve that fast.
The one honest sentence in the whole launch was Biden's, the night before: "You should not expect me or anyone else to make this token more valuable for you." About 24 hours later, that turned out to be the one promise the token kept.