Hunter Biden’s $LAPTOP: The $145 Billion Meme Coin That Collapsed in Minutes

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Welcome back to the Daily Crypto Deep Dive. There are meme coins based on dogs, frogs, politicians and internet jokes. And then there is Laptop, a cryptocurrency based on the single object that has probably defined Hunter Biden's public image more than anything else. The laptop that became a political scandal, an internet obsession and a permanent part of American political culture. Hunter Biden has now turned that history into a token. The coin is literally called Laptop, and within minutes of launching it, produced one of the most ridiculous charts Crypto has seen this year. At one point, the token briefly traded at a price that implied a fully diluted valuation of roughly $145 billion.

But the liquidity supporting that price was reported to be only around $48,000.

Within roughly half an hour, the price had fallen around 90 percent. Within an hour, it had crashed roughly 98 percent. Some early wallets made huge profits. Other traders were left nursing six-figure losses. So today on the Daily Crypto Deep Dive, we are looking at exactly what laptop is, where the meme came from, who launched the token, how the supply was structured, what sniper bots did in the opening seconds, and why an apparently $145 billion cryptocurrency could collapse almost instantly. But first, Crypto News Today is sponsored by Kraken. New users who sign up through our Kraken link and complete their first qualifying trade can receive 20 XRP. The link is in the description, and we also give XRP away to listeners every week. To understand the coin, you have to go back to 2019

A MacBook Pro attributed to Hunter Biden was left at a computer repair shop in Wilmington, Delaware. In October 2020, only weeks before the US presidential election, the New York Post published stories based on material it said had come from the laptop. The material included business emails, messages, photographs and videos. Later forensic work authenticated thousands of emails found in copies of the data, while experts also warned that the handling of some copied material made it impossible to authenticate every file. By then, Hunter Biden's laptop had become a meme in its own right. There is no single person who invented the meme. It developed organically from years of political controversy and internet culture.

Then, in September 2026, Hunter Biden decided to take ownership of that meme himself. He appeared in promotional material announcing a token called Laptop, built on Base, Coinbase's Ethereum Layer 2 network. The branding deliberately leaned into the history. The project's slogan was, They turned Laptop into a weapon. I turned it into a token.

Biden described the project in terms of resilience, redemption and recovery. The story itself was the product. Hunter Biden is the public face, while the formal structure involves Phoenix Veritas Ventures Limited and the Phoenix Veritas Foundation.

Coinbase itself did not endorse the project. Base founder Jesse Pollock said the team had approached Base, but Base chose not to help design or promote it. Because Base is permissionless, anyone can deploy a token there without Coinbase's approval. The tokenomics were much more elaborate than the average meme coin. There are 1 billion tokens. 30% were allocated to founders, including Hunter Biden, with those tokens subject to a 6-month lock before gradually vesting over the following 2 years. 20% was allocated for community airdrops. Part of that allocation specifically targeted people who had lost money holding Donald Trump's Trump meme coin, while another part went to subscribers of Hunter Biden's newsletter. One of the more provocative parts of the launch was the airdrop strategy. Rather than simply rewarding existing supporters, Laptop deliberately targeted people connected to the political story around the token. Some supply was earmarked for holders who had lost money on Donald Trump's Trump coin, turning the launch into an explicit political countermeme. That was clever marketing, because it gave the token an audience before trading even started. It also meant some recipients could receive Laptop without having any cost basis at all, creating a natural pool of potential sellers once the market opened. Another 30% of supply was linked to 30 predictions about future political, cultural and crypto events. If certain events occur, the tokens associated with those predictions are burned, reducing supply.

If they do not occur, the project says the relevant tokens can ultimately be directed towards charity.

Another 10% was allocated to liquidity, with smaller portions going to a foundation treasury and charity. Before ordinary traders could buy, tokens had already been distributed around the ecosystem. On-chain analysis showed that a multi-signature wallet associated with the project had received a large allocation before launch and distributed tens of millions of tokens. Professional market maker GSR received millions of laptop tokens before trading opened. Wintermute also held an allocation. Market makers need inventory to provide liquidity, so that is not proof of wrongdoing. But it matters because large amounts of supply were already positioned before retail arrived. Then the token went live. The planned launch price was around 5 cents. Almost immediately, automated trading systems started buying. These are often called sniper bots. A sniper bot watches a blockchain and detects the exact moment liquidity becomes available. A bot can react almost instantly, long before a human can manually place the same trade. When those bots hit Laptop, the available liquidity was extremely thin relative to the attention surrounding the launch. That pushed the marginal price violently higher. Within approximately two minutes, Laptop briefly traded around $190.