Hunter Biden’s long and controversial relationship with his own infamous laptop has taken a new and humiliating turn. This week the president’s son launched a cryptocurrency named directly after the scandal that has followed him for years, and within roughly ninety minutes of hitting the market, the coin had lost nearly all of its value, a spectacular flop that even seasoned crypto traders called embarrassing.
The token, called $LAPTOP, was first reported by the Wall Street Journal on Monday, September 8, before Hunter Biden confirmed the launch himself on social media. He posted the ticker symbol alongside a thirty-one-second clip pulled from Fox News coverage of the laptop scandal, a choice that immediately struck observers as a strange attempt to profit off of the very controversy he and his allies spent years trying to discredit.
The coin officially went live on the Base blockchain on Wednesday, September 9. What happened next was almost a caricature of everything critics have long said about celebrity meme coins. Within minutes of opening, LAPTOP’s price rocketed to as high as roughly 190 to 222 dollars, driven by a wave of speculative buying and social media hype surrounding Biden’s name. Traders piled in fast, hoping to catch the wave early.
The wave crashed almost immediately. Within about an hour, the token had shed nearly all of that value, tumbling to somewhere between two and five dollars depending on the exchange being tracked. Multiple outlets pegged the drop at right around 98 percent, a collapse so fast that crypto commentators joked it broke records even by meme coin standards, where spectacular flameouts are already the norm.
The mechanics behind the crash were not complicated, and they exposed exactly the kind of thin, speculative foundation that critics of the meme coin industry have warned about for years. Even after the price cratered, the token’s paper market capitalization briefly sat above one billion dollars, an eye-popping figure that had almost nothing to do with reality. The liquidity pool actually backing the coin, the real money available to support trading, amounted to only about two and a half million dollars. In other words, the vast majority of that so-called billion-dollar valuation existed only on paper, propped up by a tiny sliver of real capital.
That imbalance is precisely how early buyers and automated trading bots were able to make out with massive gains while everyone who bought even minutes later got left holding worthless tokens. Crypto watchers pointed out that the launch timeline itself invited this kind of exploitation. Biden’s team announced the exact launch date two days in advance, giving so-called snipers, bots programmed to buy the instant a token goes live, a running head start over ordinary retail buyers hoping to get in early.
The reaction from the broader crypto community was swift and largely unsympathetic. Many traders mocked Biden directly, pointing out the obvious hypocrisy of the move. Hunter Biden has spent years criticizing Donald Trump’s own foray into meme coins, and yet here he was launching what amounted to an identical scheme built around his own personal scandal. One widely shared comment summed up the sentiment bluntly, accusing Biden of blasting Trump for running a scam only to turn around and run one himself.
Biden’s coin even took a direct shot at Trump’s meme coin community as part of its pitch. The LAPTOP token specifically targeted people who had already lost money buying Trump’s official meme coin, offering a twenty percent airdrop of LAPTOP’s total token supply to those self-described biggest losers. It was a marketing hook clearly designed to generate buzz by appealing to Trump critics in the crypto space, but it also invited immediate comparisons between the two coins that Biden’s team likely did not want.
Those comparisons are not flattering to either side, though conservatives were quick to note the irony. President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump launched their own meme coins in early 2025 ahead of his return to office, coins that reportedly generated roughly one billion dollars in gains for the Trump family while the vast majority of ordinary investors who bought in ended up losing money. Both of those tokens have themselves lost more than 90 percent of their value since launch. Biden’s meme coin, in other words, did not invent the scam. It simply became the latest entry in a genre Trump’s own coin helped popularize, only Biden’s version collapsed even faster and more completely.
The backstory driving all of this attention is, of course, the laptop itself. Hunter Biden dropped the device off at a computer repair shop in Wilmington, Delaware, back in April of 2019. The FBI seized it roughly five months later. What was found on the device—emails, financial records, and a trove of explicit photographs and videos—became one of the most explosive political stories of the 2020 campaign, dominating coverage in conservative media even as many mainstream outlets initially downplayed or dismissed the story’s significance.
Biden’s legal team has long maintained the files were manipulated, a defense that has done little to quiet years of scrutiny over the laptop’s contents and their relevance to his business dealings. Biden himself has more recently taken to social media, Substack, and various podcast appearances to address the controversy head-on, describing a period of severe addiction to crack cocaine and alcohol during the years in question, while insisting prosecutors never found evidence of corruption beyond conduct tied to his drug use.
It is against that backdrop that Biden decided to launch a cryptocurrency literally named after his most infamous personal scandal, a decision that struck many observers, including some sympathetic to him, as bizarre at best. Financial pressure appears to be at least part of the motivation. Biden has made direct references to mounting legal bills in recent interviews, and critics were quick to connect the dots between those comments and his sudden interest in a fast cash scheme built around speculative crypto trading.
Biden has been vocal about his enthusiasm for digital currency more broadly for some time now, previously calling on Congress to better understand the value of cryptocurrency and describing decentralized digital currency as an inevitable part of the financial future. He has also embraced Bitcoin in his art career, accepting the cryptocurrency as payment and issuing blockchain-based certificates of authenticity for his work, all part of a public rebranding effort that has met with mixed success at best.
None of that enthusiasm translated into a successful launch this week. Within a day of the crash, trackers showed LAPTOP trading for fractions of a cent; its market capitalization reduced to somewhere in the low hundreds of thousands of dollars, a staggering fall from its brief and illusory billion-dollar peak. Daily trading volume, once measured in the tens of millions during the initial frenzy, dropped off sharply as interest evaporated almost as quickly as it had appeared.
