Hunter Biden-linked meme coin LAPTOP hit the market Wednesday morning and almost immediately replayed a pattern crypto traders know well: a sharp pump followed by an even sharper dump.
The token takes its name from the Delaware laptop saga that surrounded Biden through the 2020 U.S. election and for years afterward. LAPTOP launched on Base, Coinbase’s Ethereum layer-2 network, at 8 a.m. ET on Wednesday.
LAPTOP peaked two minutes after launch
According to blockchain intelligence firm Arkham, the token topped out at $190.81 just two minutes later. At that price, LAPTOP carried a fully diluted valuation of nearly $144 billion, while the liquidity pool held only $48,000.
Arkham posted that LAPTOP launched at 8:02pm and reached its peak at 8:04, adding: 「The FDV of the coin is currently $144B and the liquidity pool contains $48K.」
That gap between headline valuation and real tradable liquidity set up the breakdown. Within 30 minutes, LAPTOP had lost about 90% of its value. By the one-hour mark, it was trading near $4.77. Decrypt described the GeckoTerminal LAPTOP-USD chart as a straight vertical green candle followed by an immediate red reversal and then a long tail that gradually flattened out.
By the afternoon, the token had stabilized in the low single digits, changing hands around $1.97. That left it down nearly 99% from its intraday high. Thin trading still produced double-digit moves over some shorter intervals. Even so, that price was enough for a reported market capitalization of about $780 million and a fully diluted valuation of $2.2 billion, placing the token within the top 100 crypto assets by market cap.
On-chain data showed winners and losers in real time
On-chain trackers captured both sides of the launch almost as it happened. The traders who sold as quickly as possible were the ones who made money.
One wallet withdrew $249,800 from Binance before launch, bought 9,124 LAPTOP, and sold most of the position minutes later for roughly $1.18 million.
Another trader got caught on the other side. Based on the same tracking data, that trader spent about $200,000 to buy 919 LAPTOP at around $218 per token. Less than an hour later, the position was worth under $3,000. Decrypt said the difference between those two outcomes came down almost entirely to timing measured in seconds, not minutes.
The launch echoed earlier political meme coins
Decrypt said LAPTOP’s first-day trajectory closely matched the two most prominent political meme coins that came before it. President Donald Trump’s TRUMP token peaked near $75 shortly after its January 2025 launch and now trades around $2.24, down roughly 97% from its high.
Nearly 1 million holders collectively lost an estimated $3.81 billion on that coin.
Melania Trump’s token followed a similar path, falling more than 99% from its own peak. Decrypt also reported that LAPTOP’s tokenomics were built with that history in mind, with part of the airdrop reserved for wallets that lost money holding TRUMP.
Before LAPTOP launched, Decrypt said this was the most likely outcome. The outlet wrote that political and celebrity tokens reliably attract an initial wave of buyers no matter how the internet feels about the person attached to the project, while the second wave, the one that decides whether a token becomes a headline or a punchline, has more often gone badly.
Investor Mark Cuban’s line that every meme coin is 「a rug pull in the works」 was presented as a view many crypto traders appear to bring to launches like this one.
Too early to say whether the story is over
The first hours of trading fit a classic pump-and-dump setup: concentrated supply, thin liquidity, a fast spike driven by snipers and bots, then a crash after early buyers took profit. Decrypt said that reading matches what is visible so far in both the chart and the on-chain data, though it is not unusual and appears in many token launches.
For comparison, the report pointed to SpaceX, described in the article as the world’s largest IPO, saying it has traded below its listing price for most of its time on the market. That means most retail holders have been underwater since the IPO, and not a single trader who bought SPCX during its first week is currently in profit.
From that perspective, a token that has already fallen nearly 99% from its peak has less room left to keep dropping in percentage terms. At the same time, LAPTOP still has tokenomic mechanisms designed to play out over months rather than hours, including a six-month lockup on founder tokens, a 30-event burn schedule, and staggered airdrop rounds.
Whether Wednesday’s opening spike was the whole story or only the first chapter will depend on how LAPTOP trades after launch-day snipers move on, and on when the claim-and-hold behavior of airdrop recipients tied to TRUMP losses begins to show up in the on-chain data.