Hunter Biden’s LAPTOP memecoin lost roughly 98 percent of its value within hours of launching on Coinbase’s Base network on Sept. 9, and the project’s team is now pointing the finger at sniper bots and thin liquidity as traders rack up six-figure losses.
By Carlos Martinez | September 12, 2026
The token, which trades under the ticker LAPTOP, soared after its debut and then collapsed nearly 98 percent on its first day of trading, as reported by Quartz, the Financial Times and Forbes. By the end of the week, headlines had gotten worse: CoinDesk reported that traders suffered six-figure losses, and the New York Post reported that the token “crushed” four out of five buyers while one mystery trader walked away with roughly 1 million USD in profit. For anyone who bought the launch, the damage was immediate and brutal.
The Hook: A Political Memecoin That Imploded in Hours
LAPTOP was never a normal token launch. It is the brainchild of Hunter Biden, son of the former U.S. president, who framed the project as a way to reclaim the laptop controversy that followed him for years. “I understand the cynicism,” he wrote on X before the launch. “Why something that has been so misused by grifters?” He described himself as “clear, strong, seven years sober, and with a lot to say.”
The pitch was provocative on purpose. The token launched on Base — the Ethereum layer 2 network built by Coinbase, which works like an express lane on a highway to keep fees low and speeds high — with a total supply of 1 billion tokens. Unlike most celebrity coins, it came with an unusual structure: airdrops for wallets that lost money on President Donald Trump’s TRUMP memecoin, and a burn mechanism tied to real-world events. None of that stopped the crash.
On-Chain Evidence: How the Token Was Built
According to the launch documentation reported by crypto.news, the 1 billion token supply was split into four large pieces:
- 30 percent to founders — including Biden himself — locked for six months after launch and then released gradually over more than two years, meaning the earliest founder tokens cannot hit the open market until March 2027.
- 20 percent to community airdrops — including wallets that lost money holding TRUMP, Biden’s Substack subscribers, and the mailing list of video journalist Andrew Callaghan’s Channel 5.
- 30 percent tied to 30 predetermined events — political, crypto and cultural predictions such as a Democratic victory in the 2028 U.S. presidential election, Bitcoin hitting a new all-time high, or LAPTOP overtaking TRUMP’s market value. Tokens linked to predictions that come true are burned; tokens tied to outcomes that do not happen go to charity.
- 20 percent for operations — liquidity, exchange listings, legal expenses and administration.
On paper, that is a more disciplined design than the average political memecoin, where insiders routinely dump within hours of launch. In practice, the market did not care. The token spiked, then almost entirely evaporated on day one.
The Core Conflict: Sniper Bots or a ‘Classic Rug Pull’?
The blame game started immediately. According to CoinDesk, the LAPTOP team blamed bots after the 98 percent crash, and The Block reported that the team cited sniper bots — automated programs that buy tokens the instant a liquidity pool opens, like cutting in line at a store opening — and thin liquidity, meaning there was not enough money in the trading pool to absorb selling without crashing the price.
Not everyone accepts that explanation. The New York Post called the episode a “classic rug pull” in its coverage of the collapse, a term crypto traders use when a token’s price collapses and ordinary buyers are left holding the losses. The Post reported that one mystery trader earned roughly 1 million USD while four out of five buyers lost money. Biden, for his part, pushed back publicly. In the days after the collapse, Fox Business reported that the former first son “lashed out” at critics over the token’s demise.
The fallout spread beyond the token itself. Kraken, a major U.S. crypto exchange, deleted a promotional LAPTOP post from its official channels after traders criticized it, according to crypto.news. Base founder Jesse Pollak said the network chose not to help design or promote the token, an unusual public distancing from a project launching on his own chain.
Market Implications: The TRUMP Shadow and the Political Memecoin Boom
LAPTOP cannot be separated from the token it explicitly targeted. Biden pitched the airdrop as compensation of sorts for TRUMP holders, and the numbers explain why that audience exists. The TRUMP memecoin, which launched days before Trump’s second inauguration in January 2025, hit an all-time high of 73.43 USD before falling to a record low of 1.37 USD by Aug. 13, 2026 — a decline of roughly 98 percent from its peak, according to crypto.news.
The carnage is broad. Nansen data cited in July showed that nearly 989,000 wallets — out of roughly 1.48 million that bought TRUMP — were sitting on a combined 3.81 billion USD in unrealized losses. The token briefly rallied 93 percent in August, climbing from 1.37 USD to 3.60 USD in 10 days, before dropping sharply after wallets linked to the team transferred 2.62 million TRUMP worth 6.21 million USD to OKX.
For regular investors, the lesson is straightforward. Political memecoins are among the riskiest assets in crypto — they are driven by attention, not fundamentals, and even elaborate lockup schedules and charity-linked burns did not protect LAPTOP buyers from a first-day collapse. The broader market, meanwhile, remains calmer but watchful: Bitcoin traded around 77,100 USD on Saturday, roughly flat on the day, with Solana — the network that hosted most earlier political tokens — near 102 USD, according to CoinGecko data. The Fear and Greed Index sat at 63, signaling greed.
The Verdict
LAPTOP may yet follow through on its promised airdrops to TRUMP losers and its unusual conditional burns. But the launch-day math is already written: a token that promised to be different from every political cash grab behaved exactly like one on the price chart. The team blames bots. Buyers blame the team. Regulators, so far, have said nothing. Until the founder lockups expire in 2027, the only certainty is that the most infamous laptop in American politics has now cost crypto traders real money.
The cryptocurrency market remains highly volatile. This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice.
98 percent down in hours and the team blames sniper bots. my brother in christ, the sniper bots WERE the launch
one wallet walking away with a million while 4 out of 5 buyers got crushed is just the base launch meta at this point
A political memecoin imploding on day one is the least surprising news of the year. The six-figure losses are the sad part.
98 percent down in hours and the official explanation is bots? the liquidity was thin because the team made it thin lmao
^ bots snipe literally every launch on base, the good ones survive it. this one didnt because it was never meant to
four out of five buyers crushed and it still trades. people never learn
Six-figure losses on a token named after a laptop. The due diligence was right there in the ticker.