LAPTOP, a meme coin launched on Base with Hunter Biden’s involvement, opened trading at 8 p.m. on Sept. 9 and then fell more than 99% within hours. By around 11 p.m., GMGN data cited by Foresight News showed that extremely thin liquidity had produced a sharp opening wick, briefly pushing the token’s fully diluted valuation above $300 billion before it quickly dropped back to about $1.82 billion. The token was last quoted at $1.828.
The project had been promoted as a token meant to compensate traders who lost money holding TRUMP. Eric Trump mocked the launch on X, writing that 「Hunter should go back to painting」.
Thin liquidity turned the opening into an extreme price swing
LAPTOP has a stated total supply of 1 billion tokens. Trading first appeared in pools on Aerodrome and Uniswap on Base. As of publication, none of the major centralized exchanges had listed the token.
Lookonchain said a wallet beginning with 0xb02b withdrew $250,000 from Binance in advance and used the funds to buy LAPTOP immediately after trading started. The wallet spent $200,000 to acquire 919 LAPTOP at a price of $218 per token. By around 9 p.m. that position was worth only about $3,000.
Bubblemaps data showed broad losses across market participants. According to the report, 80% of traders lost money: two addresses lost between $100,000 and $1 million, 100 addresses lost more than $10,000, 700 addresses lost more than $1,000, and 11,000 addresses recorded smaller losses.
Not everyone lost. Lookonchain said one trader spent only 900 USDC to buy 2,268.56 LAPTOP at $0.40 each, then sold the entire position at an average price of $111, receiving 251,270 USDC. The profit exceeded $250,000, equal to roughly a 278x return.
Disclosure document said the token has no utility, governance, or revenue rights
Foresight News said LAPTOP’s price action was not surprising. The token’s disclosure document explicitly states that it carries no utility, no governance function, and no claim on revenue. In that setup, opening price formation depended on the pace of airdrop claims, market-maker inventory, and how much follow-on buying the market could absorb.
The report described LAPTOP as a token that first printed an illusory top in a shallow liquidity pool and then slid quickly as airdrop claims and secondary-market selling hit the market. On-chain activity also showed pairs of newly created addresses claiming tokens and selling them right away. Market-maker wallets started distributing tokens as well, while the project continued to frame the launch around 「resilience, redemption and recovery」.
Wintermute sold about 466,300 tokens for roughly $2.08 million
On-chain monitoring broke selling pressure into several layers. According to Ai Yi, Wintermute was one of LAPTOP’s market makers alongside GSR Markets and G20. Twenty-three hours earlier, Wintermute had received 2.5 million market-making tokens from the LAPTOP multisig wallet and later distributed them to several exchange deposit addresses. The other two market makers had received tokens days earlier.
Lookonchain said Wintermute then sold part of that allocation on-chain. At the time of its disclosure, Wintermute had sold about 466,300 LAPTOP at an average price of around $4.47, bringing in about $2.08 million, while still holding more than 2 million tokens.
The report noted that it is not unusual for a project team to allocate inventory to professional market makers. What drew attention here was the timing: the sales appeared within two hours of launch, after the token had already dropped about 90% from its perceived peak. In the market’s reading, liquidity was being converted into stablecoins.
Airdrop recipients and newly created wallets became another focus
The airdrop was another major source of selling. The report said Biden subscribers became some of the direct beneficiaries of the distribution, and many of them chose to sell after receiving tokens.
Trader Rune wrote on X that anyone holding LAPTOP should sell. He said airdrop wallets collectively held tokens valued at about $7.9 billion, that each Biden subscriber received $400,000 worth of tokens and sold immediately, and that he believed the official team had created 1 million paid Substack accounts. According to Rune, those 「subscribers」 had sold about $3 million worth of tokens so far.
Foresight News added an important caveat: the claim that each subscriber received $400,000 appears exaggerated and was more likely an aggregated cash-out flow produced by multiple sybil addresses.
Rune later posted what he said was supporting transaction evidence. He pointed to a new wallet, 0x8DA...A18d, which claimed 4,276 tokens for free and sold them for $400,000. He also said the same wallet sent 0.02 ETH to another new wallet, 0xc27...b591, which then claimed 4,276 tokens for free and sold about $200,000 worth.
Users in the X comment section cited those records to question whether coordinated distribution was taking place. The report stopped short of calling that proof of common control, but said the pattern itself was clear enough: free inventory was treated as instant cash rather than as a narrative trophy.
Bubblemaps also said most of the major LAPTOP holding addresses were newly created wallets, and 60% of them had no prior activity. In the report’s framing, the large holders visible on-chain did not look like organic retail holders. They looked more like a batch of freshly opened wallets.
The claim window remains open for 30 days, but selling pressure has already entered the market.
Traders described the launch as another pump-and-dump case
After LAPTOP went live, trader Bonk Guy (@theunipcs) wrote that the token’s FDV had briefly reached $100 billion. He described the project as one launched by 「people who know nothing about crypto and are doing this for profit」.
Bonk Guy also questioned Hunter Biden’s connection to the crypto sector and criticized the Biden administration’s stance toward the industry during Joe Biden’s presidency. He said anyone buying LAPTOP 「deserves to lose all their money」 and predicted that the token could become one of the fastest celebrity coin pump-and-dump examples in crypto history.
The report said 30% of the allocation reserved for the founding team is still locked and is not part of immediate selling pressure. The inventory actually reaching the market consists of unlocked airdrop tokens, liquidity allocations, and market-making inventory. It added that the 30% tied to the prediction event still awaits a ruling and will neither be burned nor turn into buy-side demand in the near term. Circulating supply is about 350 million tokens. Against daily turnover in the tens of millions of dollars and liquidity pools that are not especially deep, any concentrated wave of claims and sales can push the price lower.
More than 27,000 holders, but verified code did not change the trading structure
Political celebrity coins are not new. The report noted that 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, that cycle was compressed from days into minutes.
As of publication, GMGN data showed LAPTOP had more than 27,000 holders.
The token’s source code has been verified. Technically, the contract itself appears clean. The report argued that this does not solve the more immediate problem: holders of free inventory have no obligation to stay with a 「redemption」 narrative through a 36-month unlock schedule.
Disclaimer: Markets carry risk and this article does not constitute investment advice. Readers should assess whether any opinion, view, or conclusion cited in the report fits their own circumstances and bear responsibility for their own investment decisions.
