Hunter Biden’s LAPTOP Meme Coin Crashes 99% After Launch

Hunter Biden’s LAPTOP meme coin experienced a dramatic first day of trading on Wednesday, soaring to nearly $191 shortly after launch before losing almost 99% of its value.

The token launched on Base, the Ethereum layer-2 network developed by Coinbase, at around 8:00 a.m. ET. According to blockchain data tracked by Arkham, LAPTOP reached an early peak of $190.81 roughly two minutes after trading began. At that price, its fully diluted valuation briefly approached $144 billion, despite having only around $48,000 in liquidity.

The huge difference between the implied valuation and available liquidity left the token highly exposed to sharp price movements. LAPTOP lost roughly 90% of its value within the first 30 minutes. About an hour after launch, the token was trading near $4.77.

By the afternoon, LAPTOP had settled around the $2 level. At approximately $1.97, the token was almost 99% below its record high, although thin liquidity continued to produce sharp short-term price swings. Despite the crash, the token still carried a market capitalization of roughly $780 million and a fully diluted valuation of around $2.2 billion.

On-chain data showed how dramatically the launch affected individual traders. One wallet reportedly withdrew about $249,800 from Binance before the launch, purchased 9,124 LAPTOP tokens and sold most of the position minutes later for approximately $1.18 million.

Another trader suffered the opposite outcome. The wallet spent around $200,000 buying 919 LAPTOP at close to $218 per token. Within an hour, that position was worth less than $3,000.

The launch follows a familiar pattern seen across political and celebrity meme coins. Donald Trump’s TRUMP token reached roughly $75 after launching in January 2025 but later fell to around $0.44, representing a decline of about 99%. Melania Trump’s meme coin also suffered a similar collapse from its peak.

LAPTOP’s tokenomics were partly designed around the history of those tokens, including an airdrop allocation for wallets that lost money holding TRUMP.

The initial trading action suggests that early buyers, automated traders and other short-term participants played a major role in LAPTOP’s first-hour price movements. A concentrated supply combined with limited liquidity can allow a small amount of buying to create an extremely high implied valuation before sellers rapidly push the price back down.

However, the launch-day crash does not necessarily determine LAPTOP’s longer-term performance. The project includes a six-month lockup for founder tokens, a 30-event token-burn schedule and several staggered airdrop rounds. Those mechanisms are designed to unfold over a much longer period than the first few hours of trading.

For now, LAPTOP’s debut has reinforced one of the biggest risks surrounding political meme coins: early price gains can be enormous, but the same thin liquidity that fuels the initial surge can also accelerate the collapse.