Hunter Biden’s LAPTOP meme coin ($LAPTOP) began trading on the Base network and almost immediately fell 99.2% from an intraday high of $199.51 within hours of launch.

The laptop entered public view in October 2020, when the New York Post reported on emails from a device tied to Biden. The material was initially dismissed by some officials as “possible disinformation” and later authenticated by several news organizations.

Totally Unexpected

“They turned laptop into a weapon. I turned it into a token,” Biden posted on X.

Crypto investigator Stephen Findeisen, better known as Coffeezilla, had urged his audience to stay away from the token before trading began, telling them, “Do not buy it.”

As a surprise to no one, the token had also drawn imitators before it went live, with more than a dozen counterfeit LAPTOP coins surfacing across Solana, BNB Chain, and TON within about an hour of a Wall Street Journal report on the project, trading around $6.9 million combined, none carrying an official contract address because none had been published.

Counterfeits are a known hazard on Base, which drew more than 500 scam tokens in its first weeks after launching in 2023, according to Solidus Labs.

Anyway, on its first day, CoinGecko put LAPTOP’s market cap near $560 million and its fully diluted valuation near $1.6 billion, on about $5.2 million in 24-hour volume.

Airdrop Aimed at TRUMP Losers

Biden had announced the coin days earlier and set aside a fifth of the supply to airdrop wallets that lost money on Donald Trump’s TRUMP coin.

LAPTOP opened with about 35% of its supply unlocked, the remainder set to release through cliffs and vesting over 36 months, and it traded in decentralized-exchange pools with no fixed offering price. CoinGecko logged the $199.51 peak before the slide to near $1.61.

Lookonchain flagged one wallet that pulled $250,000 off Binance ahead of the launch and spent $200,000 on LAPTOP near the top, a stake worth about $3,000 by the time the analytics firm posted, citing DeBank data. CryptoPotato earlier reported a TRUMP trader who lost $207,000 within an hour of buying in March.

Of the 1 billion-token supply, 20% was earmarked for TRUMP holders who lost money, subscribers to his Substack, and a mailing list run by video journalist Andrew Callaghan, while 30% went to the founding team under a six-month lock and roughly two-year vesting.

Public Citizen has estimated that Trump-linked crypto ventures left investors at least $4.7 billion underwater, with the TRUMP meme coin alone accounting for $3.2 billion of that total.

Source: CryptoPotato