Hunter Biden’s new memecoin was supposed to turn one of the most notorious episodes of his life into a crypto community. Instead, the $LAPTOP collapse followed its launch within minutes, leaving thousands of traders underwater while a much smaller group recorded substantial profits.
Blockchain data shows that some early traders made hundreds of thousands of dollars, and one wallet reportedly cleared more than $1 million. At the same time, there is currently no evidence that Biden or the project’s founders dumped their own allocation. So what actually happened to $LAPTOP, and who made money while most buyers lost?
What Caused the LAPTOP Collapse?
$LAPTOP launched on Base, the Ethereum Layer 2 network incubated by Coinbase. Biden presented the token partly as a response to political memecoin speculation, particularly Donald Trump’s $TRUMP.
The project had a fixed supply of 1 billion tokens. Thirty percent was allocated to founders, another 30% to a prediction-based burn or charity mechanism, 20% to community airdrops, 10% to liquidity, 5% to the project treasury and 5% to charity.
But the launch had one enormous weakness: liquidity.
Related: From Scandal to Crypto: Hunter Biden Turns His Laptop Into a $LAPTOP Memecoin
The initial trading pool reportedly contained only around $48,000 while aggressive buying pushed the token’s theoretical fully diluted valuation above $100 billion. That meant an extremely shallow pool was being used to calculate the price of one billion tokens.
With so little liquidity, relatively small purchases could send $LAPTOP vertically higher. Relatively small sales could do the opposite.
The result was spectacular. Within minutes, $LAPTOP traded above $200 on some trackers before collapsing toward single digits and continuing lower. The $LAPTOP collapse therefore looks more like a broken price-discovery process happening at extreme speed.
Who Profited From the $LAPTOP Collapse?
This is where the blockchain data becomes interesting.
Bubblemaps found that 12,151 of 15,206 wallets that bought $LAPTOP were losing money following the launch. That is almost 80% of traders.
Only 3,026 wallets were profitable, while 29 were around break-even or could not be reliably priced.
The profits were also highly concentrated.
Just 88 wallets reportedly generated approximately $5.57 million in gains. Of those, 10 made between $100,000 and $1 million each, while another 78 made between $10,000 and $100,000.
One particularly successful trader spent roughly 100 ETH, then worth around $250,000, buying 9,124 $LAPTOP. The wallet quickly sold most of those tokens for approximately 472 ETH, worth around $1.18 million.
Those traders were positioned extremely early. Anyone arriving only minutes later faced a radically different market.
One buyer reportedly spent about $200,000 acquiring 919 tokens at an average price near $218. After the $LAPTOP collapse, that position was worth only a few thousand dollars.
Did Hunter Biden Make Money From the Crash?
There is no public blockchain evidence currently showing that Biden himself sold tokens during the $LAPTOP collapse.
Thirty percent of the total token supply — 300 million $LAPTOP — is allocated to founders, including Biden. However, the disclosed tokenomics place those tokens under a six-month lock, followed by monthly vesting over 24 months.
Biden also publicly denied making money from the launch and said neither he nor his team could sell their founder allocation.
That makes calling the crash a proven “rug pull” premature. A classic rug pull normally involves developers or insiders extracting liquidity or dumping tokens on buyers. So far, the visible evidence instead shows early independent wallets successfully trading an extraordinarily illiquid market.
Why Are the Fresh Wallets Getting Attention?
There is another unusual feature of the $LAPTOP collapse.
Bubblemaps reported that roughly 60% of the token’s largest holders were “fresh” wallets — addresses funded within the previous 10 days with little or no earlier on-chain activity. Many were reportedly funded on launch day.
That is worth examining, particularly when minutes of timing separated huge winners from huge losers.
But fresh wallets are not evidence of insider trading by themselves.
Crypto traders routinely create new addresses for token launches, privacy, security or automated trading strategies. A wallet created hours before launch could belong to an insider with advance information, a professional sniper or simply somebody who did not want to use a primary wallet.
Without evidence connecting those addresses to Biden, the foundation or another participant with privileged information, the wallet pattern raises a question rather than answering it.
Related: Revolut’s Bitcoin Privacy Scandal: How a Fake Government Request Exposed Customer Data
Sniper Bots May Explain Part of the Crash
The $LAPTOP team blamed much of the initial chaos on sniper bots and inadequate liquidity.
Sniper bots monitor blockchains for new trading pools and attempt to buy newly launched tokens within seconds. When liquidity is shallow, they can acquire tokens before ordinary buyers react, drive the quoted price dramatically higher and then sell into incoming demand.
That appears consistent with at least some of the observed trading.
According to the project, $LAPTOP was intended to launch at $0.05. But the combination of automated buying and insufficient liquidity rapidly pushed prices to levels that could not realistically be sustained.
The problem is that bots are hardly unexpected in modern memecoin markets. Any highly publicized token launch should assume they will appear.
So even if bots contributed heavily to the $LAPTOP collapse, the launch design itself still deserves scrutiny. A token attracting national attention should not have depended on a liquidity pool so shallow that a handful of trades could generate a nine-figure or even twelve-figure theoretical valuation.
The Airdrop Also Created Potential Sellers
Not every early seller needed to buy $LAPTOP.
Ten percent of the total supply was allocated to the initial community airdrop. Eligible subscribers to Biden’s “Where’s Hunter” newsletter reportedly received 4,276 tokens each, while part of the distribution targeted wallets that had lost money trading $TRUMP.
For a few moments, those allocations carried absurd paper valuations. At $300 per token, 4,276 $LAPTOP would theoretically have been worth more than $1.2 million.
Nobody could realistically have liquidated a large allocation at that price because there was nowhere near enough liquidity. But recipients who sold early could still turn free tokens into thousands of dollars.
That matters because airdrops create sellers with a cost basis of effectively zero. Even if they sell after a 95% crash from the token’s artificial peak, they can still make money. New buyers do not have that advantage.
Was the $LAPTOP Collapse a Rug Pull?
The available evidence does not establish that.
The price action certainly resembled the aftermath of a rug pull: a huge spike, a near-total crash, concentrated winners and thousands of losing wallets. But price action alone cannot show who caused it.
The founders’ disclosed allocation was locked. Biden denied selling. No blockchain analysis has publicly tied the biggest winning wallets to Biden or his team.
What the evidence does demonstrate is a launch structure that allowed extremely early traders to extract large profits from buyers arriving seconds or minutes later.
That may ultimately be the more important problem. A token does not need to be an intentional scam for its launch mechanics to produce terrible outcomes for ordinary buyers.
What the $LAPTOP Collapse Says About Political Memecoins
Biden launched $LAPTOP while criticizing the speculative excess surrounding other political tokens. He specifically attacked $TRUMP and promised that some people who had lost money on Trump’s token would receive $LAPTOP.
That made the launch particularly vulnerable to criticism when it reproduced exactly the kind of concentrated winners and widespread losses associated with other celebrity memecoins.
The $LAPTOP collapse also demonstrates why headline market capitalization can become nearly meaningless when liquidity is tiny.
A token can technically reach a $100 billion valuation without anything remotely close to $100 billion entering the market. If only a small quantity is actively trading, a few purchases can establish a price that makes the entire supply look extraordinarily valuable on paper.
Then the first serious wave of selling reveals what buyers are actually willing — and able — to pay.
For $LAPTOP, that happened almost immediately.
The unanswered question is not simply who sold near the top. Blockchain data already identifies several wallets that did. The bigger question is whether those traders were merely faster than everyone else or knew something other buyers did not.
So far, the blockchain has shown the winners, yet it has not shown that they were insiders.
FAQ
$LAPTOP is a Base-based memecoin launched by Hunter Biden in September 2026. The token references the laptop controversy that became central to public coverage of Biden during his father’s presidency.
The token lost more than 95% of its value shortly after launch and continued falling afterward. Exact peak prices vary between trackers because liquidity was extremely thin and prices changed rapidly.
There is currently no public evidence showing that Hunter Biden sold his founder allocation during the launch. Founder tokens are subject to a six-month lock followed by a 24-month vesting schedule.
Blockchain analysis found a relatively small group of profitable wallets. Around 88 wallets reportedly made approximately $5.57 million collectively, with several individual traders earning six-figure profits.
There is currently insufficient evidence to describe it as a proven rug pull. The crash produced many characteristics associated with failed memecoin launches, but no public blockchain evidence has established that Biden or the project founders secretly dumped their tokens.
