Hunter Biden's LAPTOP token team blamed sniper bots and thin liquidity for the memecoin's collapse, as early onchain data showed some traders sitting on six-figure losses after it fell as much as 98% from its opening levels.
The project said LAPTOP launched at 5 cents into heavy demand, but its initial liquidity was too small to absorb the rush of automated traders.
Sniper bots are programs built to detect new token launches and buy within seconds, getting ahead of regular users before prices adjust. The token spiked and reversed just as quickly.
The team said it will deploy another 4 million tokens, equal to 0.4% of total supply, to incentivise liquidity on Aerodrome pools from Sept. 10.
Early data shared with CoinDesk by blockchain analytics firm Nansen gives a first look at who was caught. Nansen recorded 46,675 buy transactions against 16,038 sells over 24 hours, from 20,085 unique buyers and 8,714 unique sellers. Most of the people who bought have not sold.
Read More: Hunter Biden's new LAPTOP token lost 98% of its value in under an hour after $1.6 billion debut
Among five wallets Nansen examined, one was sitting on a roughly $199,000 total loss after realising $171,000 and holding another $27,900 in unrealised losses. Another that bought about 28,400 LAPTOP without selling was down roughly $118,000.
One address that bought about 49,700 LAPTOP was sitting on roughly $13,000 in unrealised profit at the time of the snapshot.
Nansen put LAPTOP at roughly a $720 million market capitalisation and a $2.1 billion fully diluted valuation even after the fall. Those figures flatter newly launched tokens, because small trades in thin liquidity move the quoted price a long way.
As such, LAPTOP's team pushed back against suggestions that insiders had an advantage, saying there was no presale and no allocations for investors, influencers or key opinion leaders. The contract address, token allocation, security audit and other disclosures were published before trading began, it said.
"Everyone had the same information, at the same time," the project said in the Thursday blog post.
It reiterated that ounders' 30% allocation is locked for six months and vests over two years. Another 30% of supply is tied to a predictions mechanism, under which tokens are either burned or sent to charity depending on the outcome of specified events.
LAPTOP is named after the laptop Hunter Biden left at a Delaware repair shop in 2019, whose contents became a fixture of Republican attacks on his father through two election cycles. Biden confirmed the token on X on Monday with the ticker and a montage of news anchors discussing it — turning a damaging object of his public life into a tradable asset.
The launch drew hostility from crypto traders before it happened, with several telling him publicly to call it off.