Hunter Biden memecoin $LAPTOP loses 95% of value just hours after launch

By Joseph Adinolfi

Some $LAPTOP tokens were airdropped to wallets held by people who have lost money on the $TRUMP token, Biden said

Hunter Biden is at the center of the latest memecoin wipeout.

Like so many memecoins before it, Hunter Biden's $LAPTOP coin has flopped.

The former first son launched his namesake memecoin on Wednesday, less than two days after the project was teased in an exclusive story published by the Wall Street Journal.

Memecoins have no intrinsic value, and often see their market value evaporate within days or hours after launch. While bitcoin prices have come charging back over the past couple of weeks, the broader market for crypto tokens has, for the most part, remained in a slump.

"My initial reaction was, 'That's so last year,' " said Steve Sosnick, chief strategist at Interactive Brokers, in an email exchange with MarketWatch. "The track record of memecoins has been rocky at best, and it was not clear that this issue had either the backer or the timing to buck that trend."

According to data from Pump.fun, one of the more popular platforms for trading memecoins, volume in the token was pretty light, measuring at about $39 million since its launch.

The initial reference price of around $37 rose to a peak north of $222 a coin just minutes after trading began. But those paper gains quickly fizzled.

CoinMarketCap data, which aggregates prices from a handful of crypto exchanges, showed $LAPTOP's price soared out of the gate. The initial reference price of around $37 rose to a peak north of $222 a coin just minutes after trading began. But those paper gains quickly fizzled, and the coin was trading at around $1.80 early Wednesday afternoon, a 95% decline.

To be sure, it's unclear how much of Wednesday's trading volume was actually representative of supply-and-demand dynamics related to the token. It's also unclear how many investors lost money, although some users complained about the token's performance on Reddit and Pump.fun.

According to data from Basescan, the vast majority of $LAPTOP tokens were still held by a small handful of wallets, with the five largest of the nearly 29,000 wallets outstanding holding 84% of the total free float.

Most of the 1 billion $LAPTOP tokens remained subject to a lockup. But the market value of tokens available to trade was just under $500 million, according to CoinMarketCap.

Biden has been making the media rounds, appearing on a number of podcasts and growing increasingly vocal on X. He has occasionally posted about the virtues of crypto, which prompted some to joke that it was only a matter of time before Biden moved to launch a coin of his own.

Biden confirmed his plans to launch the coin after the Journal's story went live, through a post on his X account on Tuesday.

"The symbol they used to try to end me is now a symbol of resilience, redemption, and recovery," Biden said in the post. He also called out the Trump family for "breaking trust" when Trump launched his own memecoin, which has also saddled investors with losses.

Biden didn't respond to requests for comment from MarketWatch.

Data from Chainalysis initially shared by the New York Times has shown that Trump's memecoin, $TRUMP (TRUMPUSD), has left hundreds of thousands of wallets with losses. Most of these wallets were holding relatively small amounts of the Trump token. First lady Melania Trump has also seen big declines for her own meme token, $MELANIA (MELANIAUSD).

Some of the $LAPTOP tokens were airdropped to wallets held by people who lost money on the $TRUMP token, Biden said.

The $LAPTOP token was launched on the Base network, an open-source blockchain protocol built on top of Ethereum. The network's creation was spearheaded by Coinbase (COIN), though the crypto company doesn't control which coins trade on Base.

"Base is an open, permissionless network. Anyone can build on it. Base doesn't list tokens - that's not how the network works. Applications and tokens deploy to Base permissionlessly. Deploying on Base isn't a review or an endorsement," a representative for Coinbase told MarketWatch via email.

Biden said tokens would also be sent to his subscribers, as well as individuals on a mailing list curated by his friend and video journalist Andrew Callaghan, whose Channel Five has nearly 4 million subscribers on YouTube. In a statement shared on X, Callaghan said he had nothing to do with the project and had only shared the contact list with Biden to help him expand his audience.

Callaghan "had no idea it had anything to do with crypto, he was completely misled by Hunter Biden," Mitchell Jackson, a representative for Callaghan and other popular social-media figures, told MarketWatch. "Andrew and Channel 5 strongly condemn memecoins and want nothing to do with them."

-Joseph Adinolfi

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(END) Dow Jones Newswires

09-09-26 2204ET