Subscribe to our Telegram channel!
The LAPTOP meme coin, linked to Hunter Biden, appeared on the crypto market on Wednesday morning and immediately followed a classic pattern: a sharp surge followed by an equally sharp crash. Two minutes after its launch at 8:00 a.m. Eastern Time, the token peaked at $ 190.81, and just an hour later, it was trading around $ 4.77.
The coin’s name refers to the Delaware laptop scandal that dogged Biden during the 2020 presidential election and long afterward. The token was launched on Base— Coinbase’s Ethereum layer-2 network.
According to blockchain analytics firm Arkham, at its peak, the coin’s fully diluted market capitalization reached $ 144 billion—even though the pool’s liquidity was only $ 48,000. It was precisely this imbalance between the stated value and the actual funds in the pool that triggered the crash: the token lost about 90% of its value within the first 30 minutes.
By evening, the price had stabilized around $ 1.97—a drop of nearly 99% from its intraday high. However, even so, the market capitalization remained at $ 780 million, placing LAPTOP among the top 100 crypto assets by this metric.
On-chain trackers recorded both extremes of this trading activity. One wallet withdrew $ 249,800 from Binance even before the launch, purchased 9,124 tokens, and within a few minutes sold most of the position for approximately $ 1.18 million. Another trader spent about $ 200,000 to buy 919 tokens at $ 218 each—and within an hour, that position was worth less than $ 3,000. The difference between the two outcomes was measured in mere seconds.
LAPTOP’s story follows the same trajectory as its predecessors. President Donald Trump’s TRUMP token reached $ 75 after its launch in January 2025 and is now trading at around $ 2.24—down 97% from its peak. Nearly a million holders have collectively lost $ 3.81 billion on it. Melania Trump’s token has plummeted by more than 99%. Biden clearly took these statistics into account: part of the LAPTOP airdrop has been reserved specifically for wallets that lost money on TRUMP.
However, it is still too early to draw definitive conclusions. LAPTOP’s tokenomics call for a six-month lock-up of founder tokens, 30 rounds of token burns, and a phased airdrop distribution—all of which will unfold over months, not hours. Whether Wednesday’s crash will define the coin’s entire history or merely mark its first chapter will become clear once the initial hype dies down and the data begins to reflect the actual activity of airdrop participants.