A fast fall on Base
Hunter Biden’s $LAPTOP memecoin opened at $199.50 and fell to $26.88 within 30 minutes on Wednesday, a drop of 86.5%, according to CoinGecko. The token trades on Base, the Ethereum layer-2 network. It still saw more than $2.5 million in volume during that early stretch, which suggests plenty of people wanted to trade it even as the price collapsed.
Biden announced the project as a way to reclaim the “laptop narrative.” That story centers on a MacBook he reportedly left at a Delaware repair shop in 2019. The New York Post published emails and files said to come from the device before the 2020 presidential election. Trump allies used the material against Hunter Biden and his father, Joe Biden, who was then a candidate.
Biden responds to backlash
On X, Biden said the symbol used to try to end him is now a symbol of resilience, redemption and recovery. He also said he understood why people are cynical about memecoins. He called President Donald Trump’s token a grift and warned buyers that they should not expect him or anyone else to make $LAPTOP more valuable.
Reaction was not kind. Digital investigator Stephen Findeisen, known as Coffeezilla, called $LAPTOP a shitcoin and told followers not to buy it. Another X user told Biden there was still time to walk it back. Base founder Jesse Pollak said the project had contacted his team, but Base made a conscious decision not to help with the token’s design or promotion. Biden did not respond to Cointelegraph’s query before publication.
Supply, allocations, and a hypocrisy charge
The disclosures describe $LAPTOP as a digital collectible with no utility, ownership rights, voting rights, yield, or profit-sharing rights. The supply is fixed at 1 billion tokens. At launch, 350 million were circulating.
Founders, including Biden, are allocated 300 million tokens, or 30% of the supply. Those tokens are locked for six months, then vested monthly over the next 24 months. Another 30% is tied to political, cultural, and crypto predictions. Tokens are burned when specified outcomes occur, and released to charity if they do not.
Airdrops make up 20% overall. The initial round is 10% of the total supply. Of that, 2% is reserved for wallets that lost money on $TRUMP, and 8% goes to eligible subscribers to Biden’s “Where’s Hunter” Substack newsletter. A separate 10% future airdrop will be distributed at the foundation’s discretion.
Biden’s earlier criticism of the Trump family’s crypto ventures gave traders a ready-made hypocrisy argument. In an Aug. 21 post, he accused World Liberty Financial of using political influence, centralized controls, and financial power to benefit its founders. He said the crypto industry deserved better. Now he has launched a memecoin built around his own political identity, with founders allocated a chunk of the supply.
