Biden’s $LAPTOP launch to “correct” Trump’s “grift” crashed 99% in hours, hitting 80% of investors 

Hunter Biden spent years as the punchline of a laptop he left at a Delaware repair shop in 2019. The New York Post published files from that laptop weeks before the 2020 election. Conservatives called it the “laptop from hell”. On September 9, 2026, he put a ticker on it.

“They turned the laptop into a weapon. I turned it into a token,” he wrote on X before the launch. $LAPTOP, he said, would be a symbol of “resilience, redemption and recovery” and a rebuke of President Donald Trump’s $TRUMP coin, which Biden labelled a “grift”. Nearly a million wallets had lost about $3.8 billion on $TRUMP, he claimed. Twenty per cent of $LAPTOP would be airdropped, including to those underwater holders. 

The Wall Street Journal first reported the plan on September 7. Biden confirmed it within minutes: “$LAPTOP / September 9″, over a montage of news clips ending on Trump calling the machine the laptop from hell.

The Tokenomics were unusually elaborate for a memecoin. One billion tokens on Coinbase’s Base network. Founders, including Biden, locked up six months, then vesting over two years. Twenty per cent for airdrops (Substack subscribers to “Where’s Hunter”, a journalist mailing list, and a sliver for $TRUMP losers). Another 30% tied to public “prediction” events: the Democratic 2028 win, Bitcoin all-time high, $LAPTOP flipping $TRUMP’s valuation, burnt if they happen, sent to charity if not. Five per cent more to charity no matter what. Official contract: `0xB095274743941e953c746F9C228DA9c18Bb6ec29`. 

The pitch was moral as much as financial: take the symbol used against the Bidens and turn it against the Trumps’ memecoin machine.

$LAPTOP’s two minutes of glory, then the dump

Trading opened about 8 a.m. ET on September 9. Arkham recorded a peak of $190.81 two minutes later, an implied fully diluted valuation near $144 billion against a liquidity pool of about $48,000. Within 30 minutes, the token was down roughly 90%. An hour in, it traded near $4.77. By afternoon, it sat around $1.80, then kept sliding. 

One wallet bought with about $250,000 and sold minutes later for roughly $1.18 million. Another spent about $200,000 near the top and watched it evaporate. Bubblemaps later found that about 80% of 15,000-plus traders lost money; a few dozen wallets captured most of the profit. 

As of September 10, $LAPTOP traded near $0.75, down about 99% from the opening wick, with a circulating market cap in the mid-hundreds of millions on 350 million unlocked tokens. $TRUMP, for comparison, sat near $2 after its own long slide from a mid-$70s peak.

What Hunter Biden says, and what the chain shows

Hunter Biden did not leave the crash unexplained. In a launch-day post, he rejected the “rug pull” and “Biden Crime Family” headlines as a spin job, blamed thin liquidity, technical snags and “predatory snipers”, and said the price had already “stabilised to healthy levels”. The founders’ stash was locked, he insisted: “Nobody on our side sold, and nobody could have. I, personally, have not made a single dollar.” He added that airdropping tokens to people who lost money on $TRUMP was being recast as failure. That is a technical defence: market structure, bots, and vesting, not a confession.

It is also a standard he did not grant the Trumps. He had marketed his memecoin while calling $TRUMP a “grift”, tallied nearly a million wallets and about $3.8 billion in losses, and sold $LAPTOP as the corrective: free coins for those rug-pulled, a token that would “say something” after years of being a story other people told. When his own chart printed the same shape – a two-minute spike, 99% slide, and thousands of new victims – the explanation flipped from moral failure to market mechanics. 

The grace he withheld from Trump-family memecoins became the alibi for him. The people $LAPTOP claimed to save were invited into a second bag, then told the dump was liquidity, not a rug.

Meanwhile, on-chain data complicates the “nobody sold” line. Analysts flagged a project-linked wallet that received 100 million tokens before launch and moved tens of millions, including to market makers such as GSR that sold after the open. Founder tokens may be locked; other pre-positioned supply was not inert. Community notes on his posts cited the same discrepancy.

Yet, this is not a Biden-only story. Celebrity and political memecoins follow a script: a famous name, a thin or concentrated supply, a “fair” or “community” story, a vertical candle, then retail bags.

$TRUMP launched days before the 2025 inauguration, briefly rallied to billions, then collapsed; Trump’s disclosures later showed hundreds of millions in related fees while hundreds of thousands of wallets lost money. $MELANIA did a similar pump-and-slide. Caitlyn Jenner, Hawk Tuah, Iggy Azalea, Jason Derulo, Argentina’s $LIBRA after Javier Milei’s endorsement, and former New York Mayor Eric Adams’ NYC token all produced the same shape: hype, insider or market-maker flow, crash, and denial. 

Mark Cuban’s evergreen quote, “every meme coin is a rug pull in the works,” holds yet again.

$LAPTOP’s twist is the sermon. It was sold as the anti-grift, explicitly as payback for $TRUMP losers and a reclamation of a family scandal. Then it manufactured a new set of victims in a single morning. The people it claimed to save became the next round of exit liquidity. That is the counterpoint, and it is not subtle.