LAPTOP, a meme coin tied to Hunter Biden, plunged within hours of its debut on Base on Sept. 9 after an opening marked by extreme volatility. According to GMGN market data cited in the report, the token’s fully diluted valuation briefly climbed above $300 billion before falling to around $1.82 billion by 11 p.m. that night. The token was quoted at $0.82, down more than 99%.
The token had been promoted as a project meant to compensate holders who lost money on TRUMP positions. Eric Trump mocked the launch in a post on X, writing that Hunter should 「go back to painting」.
Official information showed LAPTOP has a total supply of 1 billion tokens. Initial trading appeared in pools on Aerodrome and Uniswap on Base. As of publication, the report said no major centralized exchange had listed the token.
Thin liquidity produced an extreme opening spike
The report said the sharp move was driven by a very shallow liquidity pool, which allowed LAPTOP to print a highly distorted opening price. One wallet starting with 0xb02b withdrew $250,000 from Binance ahead of the launch and bought immediately after trading opened, according to Lookonchain. That address spent $200,000 to buy 919 LAPTOP at a price of $218 per token. By around 9 p.m., the position was worth only about $3,000.
Another trader had the opposite result. Lookonchain said the trader spent 900 USDC to buy 2,268.56 LAPTOP at $0.40, then sold the full position at an average of $111, receiving 251,270 USDC. The reported profit was more than $250,000, or about 278x.
The article said the token’s disclosure documents made clear that LAPTOP carried no utility, no governance rights and no claim on revenue. In practice, price formation after launch came down to the pace of airdrop claims, market-making inventory and the willingness of secondary buyers to absorb supply.
It added that the token was pushed to an artificial high in thin liquidity, then fell quickly as airdrop recipients claimed and sold while market-making wallets also started distributing inventory. The project team, the report said, continued to frame the launch around 「resilience, redemption and recovery」.
Wintermute sold roughly $2.08 million worth of tokens
On-chain monitoring in the report broke the selling pressure into several layers. Ai Yi’s tracking said Wintermute was one of LAPTOP’s market makers, along with GSR Markets and G20. Twenty-three hours earlier, Wintermute had received 2.5 million market-making tokens from a LAPTOP multisig wallet and then distributed them across several exchange deposit addresses. The other two market makers had received tokens several days earlier.
Lookonchain said Wintermute later sold on-chain after receiving the allocation from the project. At the time of disclosure, Wintermute had sold about 466,300 LAPTOP at an average price of about $4.47, collecting roughly $2.08 million. It still held more than 2 million tokens.
The report noted that giving inventory to professional market makers is not unusual. But with the token already down about 90% from its artificial peak within two hours of launch, those sales became a focal point. It also said many Biden subscribers who received the airdrop chose to sell after claiming.
Airdrop dumping and newly created wallets drew scrutiny
Trader Rune wrote on X that anyone holding LAPTOP should sell. He claimed airdrop wallets held tokens worth about $7.9 billion in total, that each Biden subscriber received $400,000 in tokens and sold immediately, and that the official team had created 1 million paid Substack accounts. He also said those 「subscribers」 had sold about $3 million worth of tokens so far.
The report cautioned that the $400,000-per-person figure may have been overstated and was more likely an aggregate cash-out flow from multiple sybil wallets.
It also pointed to one transfer pattern that drew attention. The same wallet sent 0.02 ETH to a new wallet, 0xc27…b591. That wallet then claimed 4,276 tokens for free and sold roughly $200,000 worth, according to the article.
Users in X comment threads questioned whether the sales were coordinated. The report said that did not prove the wallets were controlled by the same entity, but the pattern was clear: free tokens were treated as immediate liquidity rather than as a symbolic hold tied to the project’s narrative.
Bubblemaps said most of the major LAPTOP holder addresses were newly created wallets, and 60% had no previous activity on record. In other words, a large share of visible whale-sized holders did not look like organic retail participants. The 30-day claim window was still open, yet selling pressure had already entered the market rapidly.
Team tokens remain locked, but circulating supply is under pressure
Trader Bonk Guy (@theunipcs) said after the launch that LAPTOP’s FDV had at one point reached $100 billion. He described the project as being launched by 「people who know nothing about crypto and are trying to profit from it」.
Bonk Guy also questioned Hunter Biden’s connection to the crypto industry and criticized the Biden administration’s stance toward the sector during Joe Biden’s presidency. He wrote that anyone buying LAPTOP 「deserves to lose all of their money」 and said the token could become one of the fastest celebrity coin pump-and-dump cases on record in crypto.
On allocation, the article said 30% of LAPTOP’s supply assigned to the founding team remains locked and has not yet become immediate sell pressure. The tokens actually hitting the market are the unlocked airdrop allocation, liquidity allocation and market-making inventory. It added that the 30% tied to the prediction event still awaits a ruling and, in the short term, will neither be burned nor become buying support.
The circulating supply was put at about 350 million tokens. Against daily turnover in the tens of millions of dollars and a pool that was not especially deep, the report said any concentrated wave of claim-and-sell activity could push the token lower.
The article also compared the launch with earlier politically themed meme coins. TRUMP reached a market capitalization in the tens of billions of dollars in early 2025 before giving back most of those gains. In LAPTOP’s case, the same kind of reversal was compressed from several days into minutes.
As of publication, GMGN data showed LAPTOP had more than 27,000 holders. The token’s source code had been verified. The report said that, technically, the contract looked clean, but that did not solve the separate issue of heavy sell pressure already visible on-chain.