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Hunter Biden’s Crypto Memecoin Launch Went Even Worse Than Predicted

It’s no wonder as to why Andrew Callaghan made sure to distance himself from the crypto project.
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Hunter Biden’s LAPTOP memecoin launched Wednesday morning, and the first hours of trading followed the script a lot of people expected. However, the sheer size of the move still managed to surprise the crypto market. The token named after the laptop that defined years of political attacks on Biden initially spiked to a fully diluted valuation above $100 billion that looked absurd even by memecoin standards, then shed nearly all of that paper value before lunch.

The memecoin launch itself was only announced a few days ago, but after months of podcast appearances and a stretch of crypto-friendly posts on X, a branded token had started to look inevitable as far back as June.

Specific price movements on these sorts of memecoin launches can be difficult to track, as these markets fluctuate quickly and it’s often unclear whether insiders are behind much of the early trading activity. According to CoinDesk, LAPTOP began trading on Coinbase’s Base blockchain and, within two minutes, printed a price that implied a fully diluted valuation near $144 billion while the liquidity pool backing those trades held about $48,000. The Block said the token briefly reached a $110 billion market cap minutes after launch.

An hour later, CoinDesk put the circulating market cap at roughly $1.6 billion on 350 million tokens, with a fully diluted figure near $4.8 billion. That is a drop of about 98% from the intraday peak. Pooled liquidity at that point was $2.5 million. First-hour trading volume ran about $19 million across hundreds of pairs.

The gap between those giant early prints and the tiny pool of money actually sitting behind the token is what made the chart look so violent. A shallow pool can send a new ticker to fantasy numbers on very little buying, then give it all back just as fast.

What Blockchain Observers Noticed

Many blockchain analysts spent the morning watching the blockchain addresses around the launch and not just the price movements associated with the LAPTOP token.

CoinDesk reported that a multisig address tagged as a Laptop Token wallet received 100 million LAPTOP (a tenth of the 1 billion total supply) seven days before trading opened and had already distributed about 42.5 million of those tokens. Market maker GSR received 15.5 million tokens four days before the open. Wintermute showed up with about 1.8 million in a hot wallet. The largest single transfer CoinDesk flagged was 14.5 million tokens to an unlabeled address about two hours before trading started. Pre-launch allocations to market makers and insiders like these are common with these sorts of memecoin launches.

The Block also noted that Hunter Biden’s Substack subscribers were reportedly set to receive 4,276 tokens each, a paper value of nearly $1.3 million per claim at the peak. Visual blockchain analytics provider Bubblemaps later posted that 80% of traders lost money, including two losses between $100,000 and $1 million, about 100 losses above $10,000, and thousands of smaller ones, with these conclusions being drawn from on-chain data.

What LAPTOP Was Sold As

The token’s general design was laid out earlier this week. The total supply is 1 billion tokens on Base; 30% is reserved for Biden and his co-founders, locked for six months, and then released over the following two years; 20% is set aside for airdrops, including wallets that lost money on President Trump’s TRUMP memecoin. Other slices are described as going to liquidity, operations, and charity. The project also tied as much as 30% of supply to a list of outcomes that could trigger burns, including a Democratic win in 2028, bitcoin hitting a new all-time high, or LAPTOP overtaking TRUMP when measured by market cap.

Obviously, the project tried to fold Biden’s laptop saga into the branding. The name refers to the computer he left at a Delaware repair shop in 2019, whose contents became a fixture of the 2020 campaign and years of online attacks that followed.

One of the stranger pre-launch details was the Andrew Callaghan disclaimer. After initial reports that Channel 5’s mailing list would be part of the airdrop audience, Callaghan posted that he was not involved. “We have not, do not, and never will advertise crypto,” the Channel 5 account said. He said Biden had asked to use the list, that a CSV was shared, and that Channel 5 got the addresses removed before any LAPTOP email went out.

Biden Hypocrisy and Crypto Centralization Both on Display

For a lot of people watching Wednesday, a key takeaway from the fiasco was that Biden spent much of his recent media tour criticizing Trump over alleged crypto conflicts, corruption, and profiteering, including via the TRUMP memecoin, just to then launch a memecoin of his own. Notably, Trump’s own activity in this area and the White House’s unwillingness to engage on potential ethics provisions is said to be holding up progress on the crypto industry’s regulatory clarity bill in the Senate.

Some have treated Biden’s memecoin venture as somewhat more explainable if his money problems are real. On the Shawn Ryan Show in December, Biden said he had roughly $14 million to $15 million in debt and “no idea” how he would pay it off.

There’s also another point to consider in terms of the brazenness of the crypto industry at this point. LAPTOP launched on Base, the Ethereum layer-2 network incubated and effectively operated by Coinbase. In the past, these sorts of crypto schemes were often sold as living on “decentralized” rails that would theoretically be harder for regulators to control. Wednesday’s launch didn’t even bother with that narrative.

Biden and his co-founders (or some may say co-conspirators) put what many would describe as a shady financial product on blockchain rails where one of the largest U.S. crypto companies directly benefits by collecting the associated transaction fees. This is the current state of the crypto industry’s push for the so-called democratization of finance.

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