Hunter Biden launched a cryptocurrency token named after his infamous laptop scandal, and watched it shed nearly all its value in under sixty minutes, leaving a trail of wiped-out buyers behind a venture he openly said was about making money.
The token, called $LAPTOP, went live on the Base blockchain on Wednesday, September 9, 2026. It debuted with a market capitalization that CoinDesk pegged at $1.6 billion. Within roughly one hour, the price cratered from a peak above $190 to as low as $2.15, a collapse of approximately 98 percent.
The coin generated nearly $6 million in trading volume and briefly carried a market valuation above $750 million at its peak, the New York Post reported. But the frenzy was short-lived. Prices surged from around $3 to above $300 before plummeting back to roughly $2.60 within minutes.
For the retail buyers who piled in at the top, the math was brutal. For Hunter Biden and his co-founders, the arrangement looked considerably more comfortable.
Biden and his co-founders were set to receive 30 percent of the one billion total token supply, subject to a six-month lock-up and full vesting over two years. That structure meant the insiders held a massive share of the asset while everyday buyers absorbed the price swings on launch day.
The arrangement drew immediate scrutiny. Breitbart reported that 100 million $LAPTOP tokens, 10 percent of the total supply, were distributed to market makers and an unidentified address before trading even opened. Of that batch, 14.5 million tokens were sent to an unlabeled address roughly two hours before the public launch.
Who controlled that address, and why they received tokens ahead of everyone else, remained unanswered.
Hunter Biden, who has become a fixture on podcasts and television in recent months, including a combative appearance on Bill Maher's show, did not hide his financial motives. In an interview with podcaster Tucker Carlson, he was blunt:
"I really believe in cryptocurrency. But I also want to make some money."
On X, formerly Twitter, he framed the venture as a kind of reclamation project. "They turned laptop into a weapon. I turned it into a token," Biden wrote.
Biden positioned $LAPTOP as a direct response to former President Donald Trump's $TRUMP memecoin, which launched in January 2025. That token followed a similar arc of hype and devastation: it lost nearly 97 percent of its value from its peak, and an estimated one million retail traders lost a combined $3.8 billion, the New York Post reported.
Biden pledged to allocate 20 percent of the $LAPTOP token supply to people who lost money on $TRUMP. Whether that pledge will hold up, and what the tokens will be worth if it does, is an open question, given $LAPTOP's own collapse.
In a Substack post accompanying the launch, Biden leaned into the scandal that has dogged him since 2020. "So. The laptop. Here is what was on it. Twenty years of my life, or a version of it," he wrote. The laptop saga, which involved emails, business dealings, and personal material that major media outlets initially dismissed or suppressed before the 2020 election, became one of the most contested stories of that campaign cycle.
Biden's willingness to monetize the episode marks a sharp turn. The same man who once faced federal charges and whose personal struggles became tabloid fodder is now making headlines with personal revelations and converting notoriety into a financial product.
The pre-launch distribution of tokens to market makers and an unknown wallet echoes a pattern that has burned retail cryptocurrency buyers repeatedly. Insiders or early recipients can sell into the initial buying frenzy, locking in profits while latecomers watch prices collapse.
Breitbart also reported allegations that Hunter Biden used a YouTube broadcaster's subscriber email list to spam users with advertisements for the memecoin before launch. If true, that would mean everyday internet users, people who signed up for video content, not crypto pitches, were recruited as buyers for a token that lost almost all its value in an hour.
On X, Biden posted a broader declaration about the financial system: "Fiat is a sham, the banking class is corrupt, decentralized digital currency and the blockchain are the inevitable future, and the incumbents will fight it to the death."
Grand rhetoric about decentralization sits uneasily next to a token structure in which the founder and his partners control nearly a third of the supply. Hunter Biden, who has also been making news with family disclosures about his father's health, appears to be building a media and financial brand on the wreckage of his own scandals.
The $LAPTOP crash follows a now-familiar script in the memecoin market. A celebrity or public figure attaches their name to a token. Hype drives a price spike. Early holders sell. Ordinary buyers are left holding a fraction of what they paid.
Biden's token is not the first to follow this pattern, and the $TRUMP coin's 97 percent decline showed that political memecoins on both sides of the aisle can devastate small investors. But $LAPTOP's collapse was faster and steeper, 98 percent in roughly sixty minutes, and came with pre-launch token movements that have not been publicly explained.
No regulatory action or official government response to the $LAPTOP launch appeared in available reporting. Whether the Securities and Exchange Commission or any other agency will scrutinize the token's structure, its pre-launch distributions, or the email marketing allegations remains to be seen.
Hunter Biden has spent recent months cultivating a public profile that veers between confessional memoir, political commentary, and family updates, including publicly criticizing his father's appointment of Merrick Garland as attorney general. The $LAPTOP token adds a new dimension: direct monetization of infamy, with everyday buyers footing the bill when the price collapses.
The people who lost money in the first hour of $LAPTOP trading did not have a six-month lock-up or a 30 percent insider allocation. They had a tweet, a sales pitch, and a token that shed nearly every dollar of value before most of them could blink. That is not decentralized finance. That is the oldest trick in the book, dressed up in blockchain jargon.
