Hunter Biden launched a cryptocurrency named after his infamous laptop scandal, and four out of five buyers lost money as the coin's value collapsed within minutes of its debut.
The former first son rolled out a meme coin called $LAPTOP earlier this week, announcing the venture on the social media platform X. The token surged from roughly $3 to over $300 within seconds of launch, briefly carrying a market valuation above $750 million, the New York Post reported. Then it cratered. Within an hour, the price had fallen to approximately $2.60, a 98% collapse that wiped out the vast majority of buyers who jumped in during the initial frenzy.
Yahoo Finance data cited in the original report pegged the coin's market cap at $9 billion at its peak before it plunged below $600 million in under sixty minutes. The New York Post's exclusive analysis found that four out of five people who purchased $LAPTOP saw their investment fail. One anonymous trader managed to turn a $250,000 bet into $1.8 million in only a few minutes, but that kind of outcome was the rare exception, not the rule.
The speed and severity of the crash drew immediate scrutiny. Nathaniel Bradley, CEO of the artificial intelligence firm Datavault AI, described the episode as a "rug pull", crypto slang for a scheme where insiders cash out early, leaving ordinary buyers holding worthless tokens. Bradley did not hold back in his assessment.
He told the New York Post:
"To come out and say that a laptop coin is worth $300 is, in my opinion, fraudulent."
Bradley's characterization gained additional weight from details Breitbart reported about the coin's pre-launch distribution. One hundred million tokens, 10% of the total supply, were sent to market makers and an unknown address before public trading even opened. A separate transfer of 14.5 million tokens went to an unidentified address roughly two hours before the coin became available to the general public. That pattern, insiders holding large positions before retail buyers can get in, is precisely the kind of structure that critics flag as ripe for manipulation.
The New York Post also reported that Hunter Biden and his co-founders were set to receive 30% of the 1 billion total token supply, locked for six months and fully available over two years. The token created nearly $6 million in trading volume before the bottom fell out.
For a man who recently swore under oath that he owns nothing while a law firm pursues $17 million in unpaid bills, the prospect of a 30% stake in a billion-token cryptocurrency raises obvious questions about disclosure and financial accountability.
Biden himself seemed to anticipate the backlash. In a post on X, he told potential buyers not to expect him to prop up the token's value and cast the venture in vaguely inspirational terms:
"You should not expect me or anyone else to make this token more valuable for you. $LAPTOP isn't just about owning something, it's about saying something. Everybody gets knocked down. How do we help each other and our country to get back up?"
He also took a direct shot at the $TRUMP meme coin, which President Donald Trump launched before his second inauguration. Biden wrote on X that "nearly one million wallets have collectively lost ~$3.8B" on the $TRUMP coin and promised that 20% of $LAPTOP tokens would be "airdropped to the community," including people who lost money on what he called "the $TRUMP grift."
In a separate Substack post, Biden leaned into the laptop scandal that dogged his father's 2020 campaign and that major media outlets and social media platforms suppressed in the weeks before the election. "So. The laptop. Here is what was on it. Twenty years of my life, or a version of it," he wrote. He added: "I am not denying any of it."
That acknowledgment is a far cry from the years of deflection that surrounded the laptop story. The broader Biden family narrative has continued to unravel in public, Hunter himself conceded that his father's pardon damaged the Constitution and the Biden legacy, a rare admission from a family that spent years circling the wagons.
On X, Biden also posted ahead of the launch: "They turned laptop into a weapon. I turned it into a token." Eric Trump responded with his own assessment of the failed venture: "Hunter should go back to painting."
Bisto, a crypto trading platform, issued a statement that read less like a defense of the market and more like a warning label:
"Meme coins are typically more volatile than established cryptocurrencies, with prices that can swing 50% to 90% in a single day based on social media trends or celebrity endorsements. Many projects lack the technical infrastructure or long-term roadmaps of more established crypto assets."
That volatility is not unique to $LAPTOP. The $TRUMP coin launched with a $15 billion market valuation and, as of September, had fallen to $400 million. CNN reported that many investors lost money on that coin as well. But the $TRUMP coin made President Trump over $1 billion, according to CNN's figures cited in the original report. The $LAPTOP coin, by contrast, appears to have enriched a handful of early movers while leaving the vast majority of buyers in the red.
The episode also involved the use of a YouTube broadcaster's subscriber email list. Breitbart reported that Channel 5's subscriber list was used to spam users with ads for Hunter Biden's meme coin without their consent, an aggressive marketing tactic that pushed the coin to an audience that never asked for it.
The broader collapse of the Biden family's political standing has played out on multiple fronts. Former Democratic allies have publicly turned on the family, with one prominent fundraiser accusing the party of spending years hiding a weak candidate. Even Jill Biden's public statements have added to the sense of a family struggling to control a narrative that keeps slipping away.
What remains unanswered is how the "four out of five buyers lost money" figure was calculated, what blockchain the coin was launched on, and whether any regulatory body intends to examine the pre-launch token distributions that Breitbart documented. Bradley's fraud characterization was explicitly framed as his personal opinion, not a formal legal allegation. But the underlying facts, a coin that rocketed to $300, collapsed to $2.60, and left 80% of buyers underwater while insiders held pre-distributed tokens, speak for themselves.
Hunter Biden built a brand on scandal, pardons, and evasion. Now he has turned to crypto, a market where accountability is thin and the exits are fast. The laptop may finally be a token, but the people left holding it paid real money for someone else's punchline.
