Two minutes at the top
On Wednesday, September 9, 2026, Hunter Biden turned the most famous laptop in American politics into a crypto token called $LAPTOP on a blockchain affiliated with Coinbase, with a fixed supply of 1 billion tokens. Then the chart went wild. Within about two minutes, trading feeds showed a price near $200. By this morning the same token sold for less than $1.00, a fall of about 99 percent.
That $200 price came out of a nearly empty pool, with roughly $48,000 of liquidity, the cash available for trades, sitting behind it two minutes after launch. Multiply $200 by 1 billion tokens and you get a $200 billion price tag that no real money ever filled. It works like selling one baseball card for $200 and then claiming every card in your shoebox is worth $200 too.
Most traders got burned
One early count found about 80 percent of traders lost money, 12,151 losing wallets out of 15,206. One trader spent about $200,000 on 919 tokens at an average near $218 apiece and ended up holding coins worth about $3,000.
That is a house down payment shrinking to the price of a used laptop in one day.
It’s reported that the project gave away 100 million free tokens on launch day, 10 percent of the supply, sending 20 million of them to people who had lost money betting on $TRUMP and 80 million to qualifying subscribers of the Where’s Hunter Substack. Recipients were free to sell. Two brand new wallets each claimed 4,276 tokens and sold them for about $404,000 and about $243,000. Nobody has shown who controls those wallets.
Hunter’s been clean and sober for 7 years
Hunter Biden has been sober for seven years, which puts the start of his recovery back in 2019. The laptop files and the ugliest photos MAGA Republicans keep waving around come from the years before that, when he was deep in addiction, so every time they use that old material to describe him today, they get the man wrong by more than half a decade. Give him credit for that. Staying sober for seven years and rebuilding his family relationships took grit, and he earned every day of it. That credit goes in one column, and this week’s terrible meme coin decision goes in another, where it gets judged on its own.
His own words
The day before launch, Hunter posted a note on X calling $LAPTOP a way to reclaim the laptop story after seven years sober, and he said 30 percent of the supply was locked to real world events, headed for a burn or a charity and out of his hands for good. He pledged 50 million more to charity. He also offered a warning. Nobody should expect him or anyone else to make the token more valuable for them, he wrote.
After the crash, he posted again and took on the headlines calling his coin a rug pull, crypto slang for insiders cashing out and leaving buyers stuck. He blamed thin liquidity and predatory snipers. The team allocation, he said, stayed locked, and nobody on his side sold or even had the ability to sell. He insists he personally has not made a single dollar.
Following the money
Critics went straight to the blockchain. A community note on Hunter’s post claims a project multisig wallet, a shared account that needs more than one key to move money, received 100 million tokens before launch and sold about 42.5 million of them, and that claim sits in open dispute with no court finding behind it.
One onchain analyst traced about $4 million in early sales to wallets that received tokens from the team’s shared accounts before launch, including about $2.34 million from a 2.5 million token batch that left an airdrop account on September 8. The analyst says the public wallets belonging to Hunter and the issuer show $0. The contract itself has a fixed supply and passed an outside audit with no critical findings, so he puts the problem in how the tokens were structured and handed out.
YouTube channel investigative journalist and internet sleuth, Stephen Findeisen, aka Coffeezilla and Voidzilla, did a great job with his 9 minute overview:
Why I think Hunter did it
Here is my read. Hunter wanted to take back ownership over the laptop story. For years, MAGA world swung that laptop like a club at him and his father, and I believe he saw a chance to turn his most humiliating chapter into something he owned, with money and attention riding along in the back seat. Yes, I believe he was looking to profit too. At the same time, sending free tokens to people burned by $TRUMP looks to me like a jab at Trump dressed up as generosity.
But his efforts, whatever they were, were misguided. You see, Hunter had spent a long stretch rebuilding his own life and his family’s name. He sat for candid interviews and spoke plainly about addiction and recovery. His social media posts and public statements answered years of attacks with a steady, human voice. Then came $LAPTOP.
The moment it launched on Wednesday, Hunter walked himself into the same conversation as the $TRUMP and $MELANIA meme coins, a conversation that has reeked of grift and dirt from the start and leaves a stain on anyone who joins it. He tied this token to seven years of sobriety, which makes the fall hurt worse. Every Trump defender tired of hearing about those coins now has a Biden coin to wave around. Trust like the kind he rebuilt takes years to earn and about two minutes to lose.1
I’ll be straight with you. For the past year or two, Hunter’s comeback earned my respect, one candid interview and one honest post or article at a time, and I was ready to stand up and publicly back the man he was working so hard to become. $LAPTOP knocked the wind out of my sails. For reasons I still don’t understand, he climbed down into the crypto mud with Donald and Melania and started rolling around, and that is a sight nobody fighting for this country wants to see. Tell me in the comments where you land on all of this.
Mitch Jackson, Esq.
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I’m heading into client meetings, so I asked Jill, my new avatar assistant, to give you a quick rundown of the $TRUMP and $MELANIA meme coin history. The numbers put this week’s $LAPTOP crash in perspective and show you exactly what kind of company Hunter just chose to keep.
The why is the question. I could see it as a parody of the Trumps, maybe about money, but carefully I want to say this. Hunter has something that he earned and right there that puts him in a class above them and most of the people who you know. That he has fought back from the embarrassment of everything in his past life is the earned, but staying sober, reclaiming his relationship with family and friends is the part that separates him from the people who judge him. Reading your post and knowing how difficult to impossible that journey is for so many, I look at this as maybe a stumble, but I personally see it as nothing more. A meme coin feels like nothing more a corner of his story and a message to anyone who invests in them. Fame is so transitory. Invest in the person who has more than overcome what most couldn’t.
Just another in a series of dumb (with a “b”) moves by Hunter. I’d wager he was getting bad advice; probably from the master strategists at the DNC.