Hunter Biden debuted the $LAPTOP meme coin on Coinbase’s Base blockchain on September 9, 2026. The token surged past a fully diluted valuation of $100 billion before crashing by over 95% within minutes of its launch, leaving thousands of traders with steep losses.
A cryptocurrency token launched by Hunter Biden made a chaotic debut on September 9, 2026, triggering an immediate market frenzy followed by a collapse. Built on Coinbase’s Base blockchain, the meme coin turned a long-standing political talking point into a volatile digital asset that wiped out nearly all of its peak value within an hour.
Launch, Record Valuation, and Instant Crash on Base
The token went live at 8:02 p.m., according to blockchain analytics firm Arkham cited by Cryptopolitan, and hit its intraday peak just two minutes later. At that fleeting high, the token’s intraday high was $401.12. Arkham calculated the project’s fully diluted valuation (FDV) at an eye-watering $144 billion, a figure resting on top of a liquidity pool holding a mere $48,000. Finance video coverage noted that the token went from zero to a 110 billion dollars in about five minutes
before sliding down to roughly $400 million.
Gravity caught up almost immediately. Within 30 minutes of its first post, Arkham reported that the FDV had plummeted to $5 billion. CoinMarketCap data showed the token trading at a low of $1.20 later that same day. Trading volume on Aerodrome, a decentralized exchange on Base, ranged between $5 million and $19 million in the first hour alone.
The Reclamation Narrative and Controversy Before the Debut
Before the coin went live, Hunter Biden defended the project on X, writing that he was Clear, strong, seven years sober, and with a lot to say,
confirming reporting from the Wall Street Journal. He framed the project not as an investment vehicle but as a reclamation project, seeking to repurpose a symbol that had long defined news coverage about him during his father’s presidency. He also stated that the meme coin would build community, support charity, and help those who had lost money on the $TRUMP grift,
referencing President Donald Trump’s own meme coin launch.
The total supply was set at 1 billion tokens, with 350 million unlocked at the token generation event. Founders received a 30% allocation subject to a six-month lockup and a vesting schedule. Another 20% was earmarked for airdrops, directing 4,276 tokens each to Biden’s Substack subscribers and wallets affected by the January 2025 launch of the TRUMP token, which itself lost about 55% of its value within minutes of a MELANIA token announcement. Other copycat tokens emerged on competing chains within hours.
The On-Chain Bloodbath and Insider Selling Pressure
For retail participants, the debut proved devastating. According to data highlighted by Bubblemaps, 80% of traders lost money: 2 traders lost between $100K and $1M, 100 lost over $10K, 700 lost over $1K, and 11,000 suffered smaller losses. Lookonchain spotlighted one buyer who pulled $250,000 out of Binance, spent $200,000 on 919 tokens at a price of $218, and watched that stack shrink to approximately $3,000.
“I, for one, am shocked.”
Benjamin Cowen, Analyst via Cryptopolitan
Behind the scenes, on-chain flows revealed intense selling pressure. Trading firm Wintermute reportedly took in 2.5 million tokens from the project’s Gnosis Safe. Of that total, 2.09 million tokens moved across Wintermute’s own wallets before being routed toward centralized exchange deposit addresses. Onchain Lens noted that around 500,000 tokens had already gone for about $2 million across 356 transactions. Bubblemaps had previously warned that the token’s top holders were mostly fresh wallets, noting that 60% have no prior activity
and that a wallet was funded in the last 10 days,
with most funded on the very day of the launch.
Broader Market Fallout and Regulatory Scrutiny
The collapse of $LAPTOP highlighted recurring structural issues in political meme coins. Similar historical precedents include the LIBRA token linked to Argentine President Javier Milei, which crashed by over 94% within hours of its launch.
Regulatory attention continues to mount across multiple jurisdictions regarding the structure of political token launches and the incentive asymmetries they create between founders and retail buyers. As the token settled around a price of $1.20 the same day, down over 95% from its peak, it traded across an official Aerodrome pool holding $83,000 in USDC and a side Uniswap pool with $380,000, leaving market observers to assess the wreckage of another fast-moving political crypto experiment.
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