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Hunter Biden is coming under significant criticism after the meme coin he launched Wednesday lost roughly 95% of its value within hours.
Getting into it: The token, called $LAPTOP, started at about $37, spiked to $222 within the first hour, and was trading around $1.36 by mid-afternoon. The coin went live on Coinbase’s Base blockchain, and people traded it on Aerodrome, a decentralized exchange. Price accounts vary by tracker, with Bubblemaps showing a run from about $3 to more than $300 in seconds before most of it evaporated minutes later. Bubblemaps said about 80% of Wednesday’s buyers ended up in the red and called the day a bloodbath.
CEO Nicolas Vaiman said more than 15,000 wallets took losses and that the token supply was “extremely concentrated” before launch, which he said exposed it to a rapid sell-off. The Wall Street Journal reported roughly 30% of tokens were held by Biden and the coin’s founders.
The name refers to the laptop Biden left at a computer repair shop, whose contents were published by the New York Post before the 2020 election from a hard drive copy provided by Rudy Giuliani. Thousands of emails were later authenticated, and Biden said, “They turned laptop into a weapon. I turned it into a token.”
Biden claimed that 20% of the supply would be airdropped to the community, including people who lost money on the $TRUMP coin, and pitched $LAPTOP as a symbol of “resilience, redemption and recovery,” a reference to his sobriety. He also told buyers not to treat it as an investment. Asked about it by Tucker Carlson, he said he believes in crypto but “I also want to make some money.”
In a brief statement following the crash, Biden said, “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.”
