Hunter Biden is defending his newly launched LAPTOP cryptocurrency after an extraordinary opening-day collapse sent the token from nearly $191 to less than $4 within its first hour of trading, triggering accusations that the project resembled a cryptocurrency “rug pull.”
LAPTOP began trading September 9 on Base, the Ethereum layer-2 network developed by Coinbase. According to market data reported by CoinDesk and Decrypt, the token reached $190.81 within roughly two minutes of its launch before falling as low as $3.70 during the first hour. At the $4.77 level recorded approximately an hour after trading began, the token had dropped about 98 percent from its brief intraday peak.
The numbers behind the launch were unusual even by the volatile standards of meme coins. LAPTOP has a maximum supply of one billion tokens, with about 350 million circulating at launch. At $4.77, that translated into a market capitalization of roughly $1.6 billion and a fully diluted valuation approaching $4.8 billion. CoinDesk reported approximately $2.5 million in pooled liquidity at that stage.
Blockchain intelligence firm Arkham reported that the token’s fully diluted valuation briefly reached an enormous $144 billion shortly after trading opened while the associated liquidity pool contained only about $48,000. Roughly $19 million in trading volume was recorded across hundreds of trading pairs during the first hour. Thin liquidity can produce extreme price movements because relatively small amounts of buying or selling can move a token’s quoted price dramatically.
The token takes its name from the laptop Biden left at a Delaware computer repair shop in 2019, whose contents subsequently became the subject of years of political controversy. Before the launch, Biden described the project as being connected to “resilience, redemption and recovery.” CoinDesk reported that 30 percent of the token supply was designated for founders under lockup and vesting provisions, while additional portions were connected to airdrops and prediction events.
The rapid collapse nonetheless generated accusations that buyers had been caught in a scam or “rug pull,” a phrase generally used when insiders drain value or liquidity from a cryptocurrency project after attracting outside investors.
Biden rejected those accusations and maintained that neither he nor other team members had sold their locked allocation. He also cautioned buyers against treating the project as a conventional investment and attributed the chaotic launch partly to liquidity problems.
The distinction matters. A spectacular price collapse by itself does not establish that insiders carried out a rug pull. Market data cited by CoinDesk showed the project’s unusual liquidity conditions, while reporting before the launch had already identified the founders’ allocation and vesting structure.
What cannot be disputed is the scale of the volatility. Anyone purchasing LAPTOP near its fleeting opening peak faced losses approaching 98 percent within an hour, an illustration of the enormous risks surrounding newly launched meme coins.
By September 12, LAPTOP remained far below the extraordinarily high price it touched during its first minutes of trading. Biden may dispute the “scam” label, but the token’s debut provided a dramatic reminder that a headline-grabbing cryptocurrency can create massive paper valuations almost instantly, and erase them just as quickly.
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