Hunter Biden has said that a forensic review of the LAPTOP launch found the token’s extreme rise and collapse were caused by unusually thin liquidity and later market-maker activity, while on-chain records showed the founders had not sold their allocation.
The account challenges the earlier perception of a rug pull, but the market makers remain unnamed (merely referred to as Market Maker 1 and Market Maker 2), and the investigation was commissioned by the project team.
LAPTOP Launch Exposed By Thin Liquidity
Biden said Groom Lake reviewed every recorded trade from the launch and found that a market maker given $500,000 deployed only about $5,200 into the initial pool. Fewer than 30,000 LAPTOP tokens were available there, creating a market where just $6 of buying could move the price 5%, compared with about $7,400 of selling needed for the same move.
Groom Lake compared 668 other launches and found none with a similar imbalance. LAPTOP then climbed from $0.05 to about $317 in under two minutes before ending the first hour 98% below its peak. Eighty-four seconds after the high, the liquidity position linked by the report to Market Maker 1 was withdrawn, reducing cash available to sellers near the quoted price from about $16,157 to zero.
The report also found gains associated with both market makers. The Market Maker 1-linked liquidity position ended up about $686,000 ahead, while activity linked to Market Maker 2 recorded more than $2.1 million in net USDC receipts under the report’s specified accounting.
Biden acknowledged responsibility for hiring the firms and called on the market maker he believes mishandled the launch to buy the tokens back and burn them.
Founder Wallet Remains Untouched
One point has stronger on-chain support. Groom Lake found that the wallet holding the 300 million LAPTOP founder allocation, equal to 30% of the original supply, made no outgoing token transfers through October 2. Biden also said his allocation is locked for six months and then vests over two years.
The token now trades near $0.08, up about 10% on the day, with a market cap around $29 million versus roughly $560 million on launch day. Daily volume is up 143% from a day earlier to $4.6 million, according to CoinGecko, signaling a rise in market activity that coincided with Biden’s report.
Reaction to the new accounting remains divided. Trader Crypto Bitlord argued that Biden may have been misled by inexperienced market makers, while lawyer Hailey Lennon dismissed the explanation as a post-mortem for what still looked like a rug pull.
However, Nicki Sanders, a crypto consultant, took a more cautious view, noting that the founder wallet claim can be checked on-chain but that the report was commissioned by Biden’s team and the market makers have not publicly responded.
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