Hunter Biden’s Crypto Memecoin Launch Went Even Worse Than Predicted

Hunter Biden’s LAPTOP memecoin launched Wednesday morning, and the first hours of trading followed the script a lot of people expected. However, the sheer size of the move still managed to surprise the crypto market. The token named after the laptop that defined years of political attacks on Biden initially spiked to a fully diluted valuation above $100 billion that looked absurd even by memecoin standards, then shed nearly all of that paper value before lunch.

cnx.cmd.push(function()cnx("playerId":"92b7b46b-43ed-4e0e-b21b-2c999302d9d7","settings":"advertising":"macros":"AD_UNIT":"/23178111854/od.gizmodo.com/article","CHILD_UNIT":"article","POST_ID":"2000809266","POST_TYPE":"post","CHANNEL":"tech","SECTION":"cryptocurrencies","SUBSECTION":"","CATEGORIES":"cryptocurrencies","TAGS":"andrew-callaghan,base,coinbase,crypto,hunter-biden,laptop,memecoins","NOP":"0","timeBeforeFirstAd":0).render("cnx-player-main"));

The memecoin launch itself was only announced a few days ago, but after months of podcast appearances and a stretch of crypto-friendly posts on X, a branded token had started to look inevitable as far back as June.

THE BLOCK: Hunter Biden’s $LAPTOP memecoin briefly rocketed to a $110 billion market cap minutes after launch, then crashed more than 99% within the first hour.

Subscribers to Biden's Substack were reportedly receiving 4,276 tokens each, briefly putting the paper value of each… pic.twitter.com/clQ02YMoSn

— The Block (@TheBlockCo) September 9, 2026

Specific price movements on these sorts of memecoin launches can be difficult to track, as these markets fluctuate quickly and it’s often unclear whether insiders are behind much of the early trading activity. According to CoinDesk, LAPTOP began trading on Coinbase’s Base blockchain and, within two minutes, printed a price that implied a fully diluted valuation near $144 billion while the liquidity pool backing those trades held about $48,000. The Block said the token briefly reached a $110 billion market cap minutes after launch.

An hour later, CoinDesk put the circulating market cap at roughly $1.6 billion on 350 million tokens, with a fully diluted figure near $4.8 billion. That is a drop of about 98% from the intraday peak. Pooled liquidity at that point was $2.5 million. First-hour trading volume ran about $19 million across hundreds of pairs.

The gap between those giant early prints and the tiny pool of money actually sitting behind the token is what made the chart look so violent. A shallow pool can send a new ticker to fantasy numbers on very little buying, then give it all back just as fast.

What Blockchain Observers Noticed

Many blockchain analysts spent the morning watching the blockchain addresses around the launch and not just the price movements associated with the LAPTOP token.

CoinDesk reported that a multisig address tagged as a Laptop Token wallet received 100 million LAPTOP (a tenth of the 1 billion total supply) seven days before trading opened and had already distributed about 42.5 million of those tokens. Market maker GSR received 15.5 million tokens four days before the open. Wintermute showed up with about 1.8 million in a hot wallet. The largest single transfer CoinDesk flagged was 14.5 million tokens to an unlabeled address about two hours before trading started. Pre-launch allocations to market makers and insiders like these are common with these sorts of memecoin launches.

$LAPTOP was a bloodbath!

80% of traders lost money:

• 2 lost $100K-$1M
• 100 lost $10K+
• 700 lost $1K+
• 11,000 smaller losses

Thank you Hunter Biden!