Biden's LAPTOP Meme Coin Crashes 98% in First Hour Amid Insider Trading Concerns

Hunter Biden's meme coin, LAPTOP, took an unexpected dive within hours of its launch. The token crashed 98% in just one hour, with prices plummeting from $190 to $3.70. On Base, Coinbase's Layer-2 blockchain, the token briefly reached a market capitalization of around $1.6 billion, but this was largely due to the lack of liquidity, which stood at only $2.5 million.

The collapse was directly linked to insider distribution rather than ordinary selling. According to onchain data, a wallet tagged as the Laptop Token address received 100 million tokens, a tenth of the total supply, seven days before launch and distributed 42.5 million of them into circulation.

Market maker GSR also received 15.5 million tokens four days before trading opened and immediately began offloading them after the launch. Wintermute held roughly 1.8 million tokens across multiple exchange deposit addresses.

Crypto analyst Rune posted on X that while the team promised no insider allocations, Substack subscribers were claiming 4,276 tokens each through fresh wallets that had never bought a single token, worth around $1 million per claim at peak. The airdrop wallet still holds over $7.9 billion worth of tokens.