Hunter Biden's "laptop" Meme coin plunged 99% on the first day

Hunter Biden's controversial "notebook" memecoin soared and then plunged after it was launched

Early Wednesday morning, the controversial "notebook"(LAPTOP) memecoin related to Hunter Biden officially entered the cryptocurrency market. As most "celebrity memes" have experienced before, the token quickly showed a sharp rise and then a sharp decline after being launched.

The token, named after the high-profile Delaware laptop scandal surrounding Biden's 2020 election and years since, was launched on the Base network at 8 a.m. ET on Wednesday-Coinbase's Ethereum Layer 2 network. According to blockchain intelligence company Arkham, the LAPTOP token hit a high of $190.81 just two minutes after it went online. This peak means its fully diluted valuation is close to $144 billion, compared with only $48,000 in the liquidity pool at the time.

The huge gap between valuation and actual tradable liquidity set the stage for the subsequent collapse. In just 30 minutes, the value of the LAPTOP token evaporated by about 90%; by an hour, its trading price had dropped to about $4.77. The chart of LAPTOP against the U.S. dollar on the GeckoTerminal platform clearly demonstrates this pattern: a green positive line heading straight into the sky, followed by an immediate red reversal and a long and flattening downward tail.

By afternoon, the token had stabilized at single-digit lows, trading at around $1.97, down nearly 99% from its intraday high. However, due to repeated price fluctuations due to thin trading volume, it still maintained double-digit gains in some short cycles. Even so, its market value reached US$780 million, with a fully diluted valuation of US$2.2 billion, making it one of the top 100 crypto assets by market capitalisation.

On-chain tracking tools capture the polarization of transactions in real time. Those who sell quickly after launch are the same people who profit from the launch. One of the wallets withdrew US$249,800 from Binance before its launch, bought 9,124 LAPTOP tokens, and then sold most of the positions for approximately US$1.18 million within minutes. Another trader was out of luck: He spent about $200,000 on 919 LAPTOP pieces at about $218 per token, but the value of the position had shrunk to less than $3,000 an hour later. These two very different outcomes depend almost entirely on trading timing measured in seconds rather than minutes.

The trend of the LAPTOP token on the day of listing was almost the same as the experience of the two most influential political memes before. The TRUMP token issued by President Donald Trump hit a high of around $75 shortly after its release in January 2025 and is currently trading at about $2.24, down about 97% from its peak. The cumulative losses on the token by nearly one million holders are estimated to be US$3.81 billion. Melania Trump's tokens followed a similar trajectory, plunging more than 99% from their peak.

Biden's team seems to have drawn directly from this historical lesson in designing LAPTOP's token economics: They set aside a portion of airdrop shares and allocated them specifically to wallet addresses that have suffered losses from holding TRUMP tokens. Decrypt once pointed out before LAPTOP went online that this situation was the most likely scenario. The article emphasized that regardless of the public's attitude towards the people behind it, political and celebrity tokens always attract the first wave of buyers who flock quickly; while the second wave of buyers who decide whether the token will become headlines or laughing stock often perform poorly than successfully.

Investor Mark Cuban once famously said: "Every memecoin is an 'ongoing withdrawal.'" This seems to be the default assumption of cryptocurrency traders involved in such offerings. The first few hours of trading showed a typical "pull-up" pattern: concentrated supply, weak liquidity, rapid surges driven by snipers and robots, and a collapse after early buyers took profits. Current chart data and on-chain information are consistent with this interpretation, but this is not surprising and seems to be a common part of many token issuance activities.

For reference, SpaceX (one of the world's largest IPOs) has traded below its offering price for most of its IPO period, meaning that most retail investors have been losing money since the IPO. Any trader who bought in the first week of SPCX's launch has not yet turned a profit.

With this in mind, a token that has fallen nearly 99% from its peak has limited room for further decline at the percentage level. In addition, LAPTOP's token economics mechanism-including a six-month lock-up period for founder tokens, a 30-phased destruction plan, and batch airdrops-will be phased out over months rather than hours. Whether Wednesday's sharp swings in early trading are the entire story or just the first chapter will depend on how the actual trading of the tokens goes after the sniper left the field on the first day, and whether the airdrop collection and holding of TRUMP token victims begin to appear in the data.