Article by: Boaz Sobrado, Forbes
Compiled by: AididiaoJP, Foresight News
Hunter Biden turned the 2019 "Hell Notebook" incident into a memecoin, $LAPTOP. Days after its launch, the token hit a new low of approximately $0.30. He attributed the plunge to a flawed opening: market makers injected only $5,000 into the liquidity pool during the first 30 seconds. Note: As of press time, LAPTOP has dropped to $0.24.
According to Forbes on September 14, Biden blamed the market maker's liquidity arrangement for the token's nearly 99% drop on its first day. Two days later, the price hit a new low of $0.30; on-chain data shows that about 80% of buyers remain underwater. This is not an ordinary memecoin crash, but a classic case combining political symbolism, shallow liquidity, and bot-driven accumulation.
I. From Controversial Hardware to On-Chain Tokens
On September 9, $LAPTOP launched on Base, Coinbase’s Layer 2 network. The name originates from the laptop that landed at a repair shop in Delaware in 2019 and later sparked controversy during the 2020 election. The New York Post reported on it in 2020, citing it as evidence of overseas business dealings and personal materials; the Biden campaign denied the allegations, and the controversy has persisted for years.
Biden flipped this narrative entirely, criticizing the Trump family meme coin as a "scam" while positioning his own token as a symbol of "resilience, redemption, and recovery," writing on social media: "They turned a laptop into a weapon; I turned it into a token." The project also claims it will conduct an airdrop to wallets that suffered losses on the TRUMP token. Trump-related meme coins generated approximately $636 million in revenue last year, yet cumulative losses among retail wallets reached billions of dollars; Melania-related tokens have also plummeted significantly from their peaks. By targeting these losing wallets for the LAPTOP airdrop, the project directly markets to the wounds left by the previous round of political meme coins.
The total token supply is 1 billion. The public allocation is approximately as follows: the founding team receives about 30%, locked for six months and then vested over two years; airdrops total approximately 20%, targeting TRUMP token loss addresses, Biden Substack subscribers, and email lists associated with friends and video journalist Andrew Callahan; another 30% is tied to 30 public predictions—if fulfilled, the tokens are burned; if not fulfilled, they are donated to charity. Predictions include the Democratic Party winning the White House in 2028, the fully diluted valuation of the LAPTOP token exceeding that of the TRUMP token, and Bitcoin reaching new all-time highs. The remaining portion is allocated for liquidity, foundation operations, and charitable purposes. The project emphasizes that the tokens are for entertainment and community engagement only and do not represent equity or any claim to company assets or revenues.
Two: Opening 30 seconds: $5,000 in liquidity meets overwhelming demand
The opening was anything but quiet. Some market sources showed the token starting around $0.05 and surging to over $190–$220 within minutes, with isolated records nearing $300. Institutions like CoinDesk noted that, with only about $48,000 in liquidity support, the fully diluted valuation was momentarily pushed to approximately $144 billion. This is a classic shallow pool illusion: a small volume of trades can inflate the price, but no one can actually sell their entire position at that level.
The surge was extremely brief. Within half an hour to an hour, the price dropped from its peak to just a few dollars, then fell below $1. Data from DexScreener and similar platforms showed a first-day decline of over 98% to 99%. Early the next day, some quotes ranged between $0.79 and $0.84. By the time Forbes followed up, the price was around $0.30, down more than 99% from its intraday high.
In a video on Friday, Biden bluntly stated: “We messed up. The issue was in the first 30 seconds after launch—the market makers somehow only provided $5,000 in liquidity, while demand exploded.” This became the core explanation for the incident. The project team also blamed sniper bots: the pool opened at $0.05 and, with thin liquidity, was hit by抢筹 robots, causing the price to spike before crashing. Biden denied that the team dumped the token, claiming the founders’ shares were locked and that he “didn’t make a single dollar.” The project’s foundation account on X was temporarily suspended, and responses were subsequently posted on Medium.
On-chain activity does not fully align with verbal explanations. Tracking shows that addresses labeled as market makers or related to market making sold portions of tokens during the volatility; some analyses also note that the project’s multisig received approximately 100 million tokens (one-tenth of the total supply) before launch, and subsequently sold a portion of them. The market thus questions whether the event was merely a “$5,000 liquidity mix-up.” However, existing public materials still cannot definitively classify each sale as team dumping. Biden maintains: locks are still in place, the team has not sold, and the issue lies in the opening execution.
Three: Who takes the profit, who stays at the bottom
According to Bubblemaps, of approximately 15,200 trading addresses, about 12,200 incurred losses, representing nearly 80% of the total; around 3,026 were profitable, with a small number of holdings unpriced. The majority of individual losses were under $1,000: approximately 11,300 wallets lost less than $1,000; about 700 lost more than $1,000; around 100 lost more than $10,000; and two wallets lost between $100,000 and $1 million.
Profits are highly concentrated. According to data cited by CryptoSlate, approximately 88 wallets collectively earned about $5.6 million. Lookonchain recorded an extreme case: one address purchased around 2,268 tokens using $900 in stablecoins at a cost of roughly $0.40 each, then sold them at an average price of about $111, recovering approximately $251,000 for a return of about 278x. Other wallets also realized profits exceeding $1 million near the peak. Contrarian buyers are equally notable: one trader bought approximately 28,400 tokens at around $5.97 each, investing about $170,000; after the token continued to decline, the unrealized loss expanded by another 87%.
The real trading volume in the first hour was not insignificant. According to Bitquery’s statistics on genuine coin contracts, over 260,000 trades and approximately 45,000 unique trading addresses occurred within the first 19 hours after launch, with actual turnover on the stablecoin and ETH sides totaling around $47.59 million; the volume-weighted price during the first hour after launch was approximately $23.48, dropping to about $0.79 by the same time the next day. While paper market cap can surge to billions or even tens of billions of dollars in shallow liquidity pools, the actual tradable depth is only in the millions—or even less. This is precisely the issue Biden must explain afterward: quotes are not market cap, and market cap is not withdrawable cash.
Four, over 4,000 fake trading pairs, more active than the real coins
The real coin has not yet launched, but fake tokens have already spread. Following reports by The Wall Street Journal and President Biden’s confirmation of the launch date, contracts with the LAPTOP code surged across multiple blockchains. According to Bitquery, related contracts once exceeded 4,075, distributed across at least seven chains. Within 19 hours of the real coin’s launch, fake tokens reported a trading volume of approximately $941 million, with five fake tokens surpassing the real coin’s own market volume. The largest fake token on the BNB chain alone reported a volume nearing $185 million.
Most of these figures don’t hold up under scrutiny. Fake trading volumes on trackers show tens of millions in turnover, while actual stablecoin trading amounts to only thousands. Some addresses on the BNB Chain are driving around 5,500 wallets across 43 different tokens in “farm-style” trading. For ordinary buyers, the risk isn’t just a genuine coin crashing—it’s clicking on a counterfeit contract with the same name. Even after the real contract launches, the fake ones remain active, and on-screen, LAPTOP tokens are still a mix of genuine and fake.
The airdrop side has also sparked controversy. Karahan later admitted to providing the Biden team with a list of fewer than 5,000 email addresses obtained through opt-ins from a merchandise store. After the token’s price plummeted, this list combined with the campaign’s messaging of “giving tokens to those who lost money,” leading to a significant surge in criticism in the comments section. Political meme coins are priced primarily on attention, and the email list turned attention into a traceable distribution channel.
Five: Remediation, Destruction, and the Incomplete Second Half
The post-incident remediation checklist is straightforward: inject 4 million tokens (approximately 0.4% of supply) as liquidity incentives into the Aerodrome pool; claim that both predictions have been fulfilled, with 10 million tokens burned, reducing the circulating supply by another ~1%. One of these predictions involved the artist Beeple mentioning the token. The team also stated they will deepen the order book to prevent a recurrence of the situation where the opening price was $0.05 and market makers couldn’t absorb the volume.
These actions cannot alter the already-distributed outcomes. The earliest bots and a tiny number of addresses captured the vast majority of profits, leaving retail investors with the bulk of the losses. The decline of the Trump family token from its peak has not been reversed by Biden’s rewritten narrative; $LAPTOP has even retraced the same shallow-pool logic once again. As of Forbes’ publication, the $0.30 low has rewritten the “symbol of redemption” as the cost basis for another set of underwater wallets.
The old script of political memecoins is playing out again: narratives can instantly spike prices, but shallow liquidity and bots decide who exits first. Biden wanted to use this coin to counter "laptop weaponization," but the market responded colder—the symbol can be put on-chain, but liquidity can't be boosted by slogans. A $5,000 opening arrangement turns a national wave of attention into a short-term rally favorable only to the earliest sellers.