Hunter Biden denied profiting from the LAPTOP memecoin after its value collapsed more than 95% in the first hour of trading Wednesday, insisting neither he nor members of his team sold any tokens.
"The team's allocation is locked. Nobody on our side sold, and nobody could have," Biden wrote on X. "I, personally, have not made a single dollar."
He attributed the sharp sell-off to thin initial liquidity and automated "sniper" bots that rapidly bought tokens at launch. As of Wednesday afternoon, the Base-based token was trading at $0.8562, according to CoinGecko data.
The coin is named after a MacBook Biden left at a repair shop in 2019. Files from the device were published by the New York Post and used by Trump allies to attack both Hunter and his father, former President Joe Biden, during the 2020 campaign.
In the run-up to the token launch, Biden publicly criticized crypto ventures tied to Donald Trump. On Aug. 21, he posted that World Liberty Financial, the Trump family's cryptocurrency project, leveraged political influence to benefit its founders.
The LAPTOP team released a Medium post defending the launch, stating there was no presale or allocation to influencers or insiders and that the contract address, token allocations, a Hacken security audit and a white paper were all published before trading began.
The team said the initial liquidity pool opened at $0.05 per token but that the market maker's deployed capital proved insufficient to meet buying pressure. It later announced it would deploy 4 million tokens — 0.4% of total supply — as liquidity incentives for Aerodrome pools beginning at midnight UTC Thursday, and commit to burning 10 million tokens, or 1% of supply, during the first week through a predictions program.
Under the project's disclosed tokenomics, founders received 300 million tokens, or 30% of the 1 billion total supply. Those tokens are locked for six months and then vest monthly over the next 24 months. Another 30% is earmarked for predictions tied to political, cultural and crypto events; those tokens are burned when specified outcomes occur and allocated to charity otherwise. The remaining distribution includes 2% reserved for wallets that lost money on the rival TRUMP memecoin, 8% for subscribers to Biden's "Where's Hunter" Substack newsletter and 10% set aside for future airdrops at the foundation's discretion.
On-chain analytics painted a mixed picture. Data shared with Cointelegraph by Nansen showed one LAPTOP wallet holding an unrealized loss of $117,800 and another posting a paper loss of $12,300. Two additional wallets registered unrealized gains of roughly $13,100 each. A separate analysis by Bubblemaps found that 60% of LAPTOP's top-holder wallets had no prior activity on-chain, and the firm defined "fresh" wallets as those funded within the previous 10 days — with most receiving funds on the day of launch.
