Hunter Biden's Memecoin Launch Ends in Disaster

Hunter Biden's memecoin, named after his laptop that became a focal point of political attacks on him, launched on Wednesday morning and quickly became a subject of interest in the crypto market. The token briefly spiked to a fully diluted valuation above $100 billion, before shedding nearly all of that value within an hour.

The launch was announced only a few days ago, but it had been anticipated for months due to Biden's recent podcast appearances and crypto-friendly posts on X. The token, named LAPTOP, began trading on Coinbase's Base blockchain, where it printed a price implying a fully diluted valuation near $144 billion within two minutes.

However, the circulating market cap was only around $1.6 billion an hour later, with a fully diluted figure near $4.8 billion. This represented a drop of about 98% from the intraday peak, according to CoinDesk. The token's liquidity pool at that point was just $2.5 million.

Many blockchain analysts spent the morning watching the blockchain addresses around the launch and not just the price movements associated with the LAPTOP token. A multisig address tagged as a Laptop Token wallet received 100 million tokens seven days before trading opened, and had already distributed about 42.5 million of those tokens.