Hunter Biden's memecoin was worth $144bn for two minutes, on $48,000 of liquidity
LAPTOP lost almost everything inside an hour. He says nobody on his side sold, and the tokenomics say nobody on his side could.
Two minutes after Hunter Biden's memecoin opened for trading, it was notionally worth more than Boeing. The pool backing it held less than the deposit on a modest house.
LAPTOP went live on the Base network at 8am ET on 9 September 2026. It touched $190.81 within two minutes, which Arkham puts at a fully diluted valuation near $144 billion. Behind that price sat a liquidity pool of $48,000.
An hour after launch the token was under $5. By late afternoon it changed hands around $1.61, which Wu Blockchain puts at 99.5 percent below the high recorded on GMGN, on roughly $11.7 million of volume.
What a pool that small actually does
It 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 a quarter of a million dollars off Binance before launch, bought in at the open, and sold minutes later for about $1.18 million. Another spent six figures near the top and was left holding almost nothing an hour after that. 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' allocation is locked for six months and vests over two years, and the lock does not lift until March 2027. Nobody on the team sold because nobody on the team could. Biden said exactly that on the evening of the crash, and on that point he is right.
But read the rest of his statement.
The reality is that 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 — about 2.3 percent of supply between them, per the on-chain analyst @ai_9684xtpa — can size a liquidity pool. It chose, or allowed, one that made a twelve-figure print possible for two minutes and a collapse inevitable for everyone who arrived third. Whether that is negligence or intent is a question for the people who built it. From outside, the outcome is identical.
The rest of the design is stranger than the crash
There are a billion tokens. Founders hold 30 percent, locked. Another 30 percent sits in a conditional burn tied to thirty preset events — a Democrat winning in 2028, a new bitcoin record, LAPTOP's valuation passing TRUMP's — with unresolved events sending a share to charity instead. A fifth goes to airdrops, including a tranche reserved for wallets that lost money on TRUMP. The remainder covers charity, liquidity and the market makers.
That airdrop is the part worth sitting with. Biden's pre-launch pitch 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 now trades around $2.24. A token whose stated purpose was compensating those losers manufactured a fresh set of them on day one, at roughly the same ratio. Decrypt predicted as much before launch, which was not clairvoyance. It was the base rate for political memecoins.
What happens next
Biden says the team is "actively working on the best solutions to optimize liquidity". We would guess that means a second, larger pool seeded from the foundation allocation and presented as generosity. It would help the chart and change nothing about the first hour. Our expectation is a circulating market value under $200 million by the time the first airdrop claim window closes, and none of the thirty burn events can resolve fast enough to move that.
The one honest sentence in the whole launch was Biden's own, the night before: "You should not expect me or anyone else to make this token more valuable for you." About a day later, that turned out to be the only promise the token kept.
