Hunter Biden’s LAPTOP memecoin had barely arrived on Base before the chart turned into a vertical descent.
Launched Wednesday, the token hit $190.81 roughly 120 seconds after going live. Within half an hour, it had shed 90% of its value. About an hour in, LAPTOP was trading near $4.77, and by the afternoon it had fallen to around $1.80 — approximately 99% below its peak.
The token was designed to compensate wallets that had been left underwater by Donald Trump’s memecoin. Instead, LAPTOP quickly created a new crop of disappointed holders, with the first day producing the kind of extreme price swings that have become inseparable from celebrity-driven tokens.
LAPTOP Had Winners. Timing Was Everything.
Not everyone walked away bruised.
One wallet withdrew $249,800 from Binance ahead of the launch and bought 9,124 LAPTOP tokens at roughly $27 each. Minutes later, most of the position was sold near $129 per token, generating about $1.18 million in proceeds and an estimated $930,000 gain from a position held for around five minutes.
Some Hunter Biden Substack subscribers also received airdrops that briefly reached a combined value of more than $400,000. At least some recipients were able to sell those tokens while prices were still elevated.
Then came the other side of the trade.
One wallet spent roughly $200,000 to acquire 919 LAPTOP tokens near $218 apiece. Around an hour later, that position was worth less than $3,000 — an approximate 98.5% loss, with the difference ultimately coming down to timing.
Despite the spectacle, LAPTOP did not appear to move the broader crypto market. Bitcoin and other major assets were largely unchanged in the hours following the launch, while prominent onchain tokens also showed little reaction.
That distinction matters. A token can generate enormous gains and losses inside its own trading pool without becoming relevant to the market beyond it. LAPTOP was, at least for its debut, more internet event than market event.
And that may be the strangest part of the whole episode. A token associated with a former president’s son launched, exploded in value, collapsed almost completely, and still failed to leave much of a mark on the major crypto assets surrounding it.
For celebrity coins, the lesson is less about whether a launch can attract attention than how quickly that attention can disappear.
LAPTOP managed to manufacture fortunes and wipe them out in the same afternoon. Whether that scares off other celebrities — or politicians’ children — from creating their own tokens remains to be seen.