The token named after Hunter Biden's laptop lost nearly all of its value within the first hour of trading on Wednesday. By Thursday, Biden had posted a public denial on X and the project team had published a Medium post that attributed the collapse to insufficient liquidity and automated trading programs.
At the time of publication, LAPTOP traded at $0.7983, according to CoinGecko.
"The team's allocation is locked. Nobody on our side sold, and nobody could have," Biden wrote on X. "I, personally, have not made a single dollar."
As you may have seen, the LAPTOP memecoin saw a sharp swing in token price during its first hours of trading.
— Hunter Biden (@HunterBiden) September 9, 2026
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…
vWhat happened in the first hour
LAPTOP launched at $0.05 per token on Base, Coinbase's Ethereum Layer 2 network. The project team said initial demand exceeded the liquidity available in the pool, and sniper bots moved in before regular users could participate.
Sniper bots are axutomated programs that monitor the blockchain's pending transaction pool, known as the mempool, for new liquidity pool deployments. When one is detected, the bot executes a buy order within seconds of the pool going live, before ordinary buyers can act. The bot then sells into the price spike it helped create. Late arrivals absorb the loss.
The token spiked and then reversed sharply. The team said in its Medium post that the market maker's liquidity was too small to absorb that volume of automated activity.
What the onchain data showed
Blockchain analytics firm Nansen tracked 46,675 buy transactions against 16,038 sells over the first 24 hours, from 20,085 unique buyers and 8,714 unique sellers. Most of the people who bought had not sold at the time of the snapshot.
Among five wallets Nansen examined, one was down roughly $199,000 in total after realizing $171,000 in losses and holding another $27,900 in unrealized losses. A second wallet that bought about 28,400 LAPTOP without selling was down roughly $118,000. One address that bought about 49,700 LAPTOP held roughly $13,000 in unrealized profit at the time of the snapshot.
Nansen put LAPTOP at roughly a $720 million market capitalization and a $2.1 billion fully diluted valuation after the fall. Biden said on X the fully diluted valuation exceeded $1 billion. Both figures reflect the reality that thin liquidity on newly launched tokens allows small trades to move quoted prices by large margins.
Blockchain analytics platform Bubblemaps reported that 60% of LAPTOP's top-holder wallets had no prior activity. Most of those wallets were funded on launch day.
How the supply was divided
The project disclosed a 1 billion token supply before trading began. Founders hold 30%, locked for six months and then vested monthly over the following 24 months. Another 30% is tied to a predictions mechanism where tokens are burned or sent to charity based on event outcomes. Two percent went to wallets that lost money on the TRUMP memecoin and 8% to eligible subscribers of Biden's Substack newsletter.
The TRUMP memecoin launched in January 2025, days before Donald Trump's presidential inauguration. It drew sustained criticism over potential conflicts of interest and became the primary reference point for politically associated token launches in the U.S.
Before his own launch, Biden had publicly criticized the Trump family's crypto activity. In an August 21 post on X, he said World Liberty Financial used political influence and leverage to benefit its founders.
The Trump family’s business, World Liberty Financial, is corruption at a scale we’ve never seen.
— Hunter Biden (@HunterBiden) August 20, 2026
World Liberty is currently being sued by Justin Sun, a major crypto founder, for:
1.Seizing his $75 million $WLFI investment.
2.Secretly adding controls allowing it to unilaterally…
What the project plans next
The LAPTOP team said it would deploy 4 million tokens, equal to 0.4% of total supply, as liquidity incentives for Aerodrome pools from September 10, and burn 10 million tokens within the first week through its predictions program.
Aerodrome Finance is the primary decentralized exchange on Base. It uses a vote-escrow tokenomics model adapted from Velodrome Finance on Optimism, a structure designed to reward sustained liquidity provision over short-term deposits.
The contract address, token allocations, a Hacken security audit, and a white paper were all published before trading began. Hacken is a blockchain cybersecurity firm that conducts smart contract audits. A pre-launch audit is a standard transparency measure in the space, though it provides no protection against liquidity-driven price crashes.
The project said in a Thursday post:
"Everyone had the same information, at the same time."
LAPTOP takes its name from a MacBook Biden left at a Delaware repair shop in 2019, whose contents became a fixture of Republican attacks across two presidential election cycles. The California Senate passed a bill this year to ban memecoin issuance by public officials, reflecting broader legislative attention to politically connected token launches.
Roman Zaika
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