Hunter Biden's LAPTOP crashes 95% within 30 minutes of launch, as analysts warned

In roughly 30 minutes after Hunter Biden’s meme coin, LAPTOP, went live on Base, over 95% of its value got wiped out, according to blockchain analytics firm Arkham.

Those who are still holding the token are now left with a fraction of what they paid. 

$LAPTOP was a bloodbath!

80% of traders lost money:

• 2 lost $100K-$1M
• 100 lost $10K+
• 700 lost $1K+
• 11,000 smaller losses

Thank you Hunter Biden! 🤡 pic.twitter.com/kncqLeiZ4B

— Bubblemaps (@bubblemaps) September 9, 2026

A peak that lasted two minutes

LAPTOP went live at 8:02 p.m. and set its high two minutes later. At that point, Arkham put the token’s fully diluted valuation (FDV) at $144 billion, which is an eye-watering figure sitting on top of a liquidity pool holding just $48,000.

Thirty minutes after its first post, Arkham reported the FDV had fallen to $5 billion. 

The token’s intraday high was $401.12, while the lowest it traded the same day is $1.20 the same day, per CoinMarketCap data. 

LAPTOP currently trades around $1.5, down by over 95%. It is trading across two on-chain venues, an official Aerodrome pool holding $83,000 in USDC and a side Uniswap pool with $380,000.

Market maker cashing out on-chain

Part of the selling pressure was visible in real time. Trading firm Wintermute reportedly took in 2.5 million LAPTOP from the token’s Gnosis Safe. 2.09 million of it was moved across Wintermute’s own wallets, then the tokens were routed toward centralized-exchange deposit addresses. 

Around 500,000 LAPTOP had already gone for about $2 million across 356 transactions, according to Onchain Lens.

For a token with a 1 billion total supply and 350 million circulating, that kind of flow from an insider-supplied allocation into sell orders is the mechanism a crash is made of.

The trader who turned $200K into $3K

Lookonchain spotlighted one buyer who pulled $250,000 out of Binance ahead of the launch specifically to chase LAPTOP. The buyer reportedly spent $200,000 on 919 tokens at a price of $218. 

As of the time that Lookonchain published its post, that buyer’s stack was around $3,000.

Lookonchain wrote “Don’t FOMO,” a warning that arrived too late for anyone already in.

The warnings were on the record

Before the launch and subsequent crash, there have been voices that called out the setup, and one of them, Bubblemaps, has been a consistent voice in calling out projects like LAPTOP.

Bubblemaps posted what it called the distribution of LAPTOP “just BEFORE launch.” It called on the readers to check if they noticed anything. 

In a subsequent post, Bubblemaps posted on X, writing that the token’s top holders are mostly fresh wallets. It wrote, “60% have no prior activity.” It also clarified what it meant by “fresh wallets,” stating that it means that the “wallet was funded in the last 10 days.”

The analytics platform also added that most of those wallets were funded the same day of the launch.

Analyst Benjamin Cowen greeted the collapse with a two-word verdict laden with sarcasm: “I, for one, am shocked.”

Hunter Biden, the son of former US president Joe Biden, is part of the founding team behind the token, which reserved 20% of supply for airdrops, in part to wallets that lost money on TRUMP. 

Two in three TRUMP buyers, which accounts for around 988,905 wallets, were down a combined $3.81 billion by the end of June. 

This is not the first time that a token linked to a popular or political figure will swing this way. The TRUMP token, which was launched in January 2025, lost around 55% of its value within minutes of the MELANIA token announcement. 

There is also the LIBRA token that was linked to Argentine President Javier Milei, which crashed by over 94% within hours after launch.

Hunter Biden had spent the day before the launch defending the project. “Clear, strong, seven years sober, and with a lot to say,” he wrote on X on Tuesday, confirming the Wall Street Journal’s report that he was behind a meme coin called LAPTOP.

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