Hunter Biden denied profiting from the LAPTOP memecoin after the token’s launch-day collapse, saying neither he nor his team sold any of the coins.
Several users on X accused the project of a rug pull after LAPTOP lost more than 95% of its value in the first hour of trading on Wednesday. At the time of writing, the token was trading at $0.8562, according to CoinGecko.
「The team’s allocation is locked. Nobody on our side sold, and nobody could have,」 Biden wrote in a Wednesday post on X. 「I, personally, have not made a single dollar.」
Biden said the sharp move came from insufficient liquidity and from snipers, the trading bots that rush to buy tokens as soon as trading opens.
The Base memecoin is named after a MacBook that Hunter Biden reportedly left at a repair shop in 2019. During the 2020 election, allies of Donald Trump used New York Post reporting on files said to be from the device against Biden and his father, former US President Joe Biden.
Before launching the token, Biden had criticized the Trump family’s crypto projects. In an Aug. 21 post, he said World Liberty Financial used political influence and leverage to benefit its founders.
Cointelegraph said Biden did not respond to its request for comment.
LAPTOP team sets out liquidity incentives and burn plan
In a community update, the LAPTOP team defended the launch and said there had been no token presale and no allocations to investors or influencers. It said the contract address, token allocations, a Hacken security audit and a white paper were all published before trading began.
「There was no stealth deployment, no hidden supply, and no surprise to benefit insiders,」 the team said in a Medium post.
The project said the initial pool launched at $0.05 per token, but market-maker liquidity was not enough to absorb demand.
LAPTOP said it would deploy 4 million tokens, equal to 0.4% of total supply, as liquidity incentives for Aerodrome pools starting at midnight UTC on Thursday. It also said 10 million tokens would be burned in the first week after launch through its predictions program, equal to 1% of the original total supply.
Project disclosures show that founders were allocated 300 million tokens, or 30% of the 1 billion token supply. Those tokens are locked for six months and then vest monthly over the following 24 months.
Another 30% is allocated to predictions tied to political, cultural and crypto events. Tokens are burned when specified outcomes occur and otherwise go to charity. The disclosures say burns tied to predictions affect unvested tokens.
The project also reserved 2% of supply for wallets that lost money on the TRUMP memecoin and 8% for eligible subscribers to Biden’s Where’s Hunter Substack newsletter. A separate 10% is set aside for future airdrops at the foundation’s discretion.
Nansen logs wallet losses while Bubblemaps flags fresh holders
Data Nansen shared with Cointelegraph on Thursday showed one LAPTOP wallet with an unrealized loss of $117,800 and another with a paper loss of $12,300.
Two other wallets showed unrealized gains of $13,100 and $1,800. None of the four addresses had sold LAPTOP at the time of the snapshot. The analysis covered five selected wallets.
Nansen also recorded 46,675 buy transactions and 16,038 sell transactions during the 24-hour period in its dataset, involving 20,085 unique buyers and 8,714 unique sellers.
Separately, blockchain analytics platform Bubblemaps said on Wednesday that 60% of LAPTOP’s top-holder wallets had no prior activity.
In a follow-up post, the firm said it defines fresh wallets as addresses funded within the previous 10 days, adding that most of them were funded on launch day.