Hunter Biden confirmed on Monday that a memecoin named after his laptop launches on Sept. 9, posting the ticker $LAPTOP and the date to his verified X account at 10:55 a.m. ET alongside a 31-second clip of a Fox News segment about the computer. The post had 250,900 views within an hour.
It went up four minutes after The Wall Street Journal reported the launch, in a story by Vicky Ge Huang headlined "Hunter Biden (and His Laptop) Enter the Cryptosphere With New Meme Coin." Biden is part of the founding team, according to the report.
The airdrop is the political content of the launch. A fifth of supply goes to airdrops that include wallets holding losses on TRUMP, the memecoin issued in President Trump's name three days before his second inauguration, which now trades 97% below its record. Biden's Substack subscribers and a mailing list kept by video journalist Andrew Callaghan also qualify, according to the Journal.
One Billion, Thirty Percent Locked
Total supply is 1 billion tokens. The founding team takes 30%, locked for six months after launch and released over the following two years. Airdrops take 20% across two rounds, and a further 20% covers liquidity, exchange listings and legal costs, according to the Journal's account of the tokenomics. Up to 30% is earmarked for burns triggered by named events, including bitcoin setting a record and LAPTOP passing TRUMP's market value.
Biden has not published tokenomics himself. His X post carries no contract address, website or launch venue, and his Substack, where he has written about the laptop since July, has no post on the token. His art site lists bitcoin as a payment option.
Copycats In One Minute
The first token named LAPTOP appeared on Robinhood Chain at 14:50 UTC, roughly a minute before the Journal's markets account posted the story. Twenty-two more pools followed over the next 53 minutes across Robinhood Chain, Solana, TON and BNB Chain, covering at least 14 distinct tokens, DEX Screener data shows. None is on Base, and none launches on Sept. 9.
They traded $6.9 million between them by 15:45 UTC. The largest, a Robinhood Chain token at 0x76Ed1E spread across ten pools, carried a $535,206 fully diluted valuation and took $5.43 million of volume over 31,878 trades in a single pool paired against SGOV, the tokenized short-dated Treasury ETF. The pairing follows the pattern The Defiant has documented on the chain since July, where memecoins quote against tokenized equities and generate most of the network's stock-token volume.
A Solana token called Hunter Biden's Laptop, deployed in January 2024, rose 411% to a $191,541 market capitalization on $932,561 of volume.
The Ticker Is Taken
A token trading as LAPTOP has been live on Base since June 27, up 54% on Monday to a $51,908 market capitalization on $55,602 of volume. Whether the September launch shares the ticker or the contract is unresolved; Biden's post names neither.
TRUMP At Minus 97%
TRUMP trades at $2.25, down 6.3% over 24 hours and 5% over the week, with a $613.4 million market capitalization on 273.1 million circulating tokens, according to CoinGecko. Its high was $73.43 on Jan. 19, 2025, two days after launch, and its low was $1.37 on Aug. 13 this year. Holders who bought near the top and never sold are the constituency the LAPTOP airdrop addresses.
Base holds $5.67 billion of total value locked and settled $567.2 million of DEX volume over 24 hours, according to DefiLlama. Robinhood Chain, where every copycat with meaningful volume launched, holds $908.7 million of TVL on $1.61 billion of daily DEX volume.