Hunter Biden's new $LAPTOP meme coin opened near $200 a token on Wednesday, September 9, 2026, and cratered more than 95% within hours, sinking to less than $2 despite drawing over $13 million in trading volume on its first day. The cryptocurrency, deployed on the Ethereum Layer-2 network Base, directly references the laptop that fueled a Republican investigation into Hunter Biden and became a flashpoint of the 2020 presidential election.
According to TradingView News, the token's launch followed days of media promotion by Hunter Biden, including a video he posted on X that compiled much of the news coverage the laptop generated before the coin ever hit the market, according to KFOX. The laptop itself was first publicly reported just weeks before the 2020 election, and it prompted lasting debate over its contents and authenticity, per the same outlet's reporting. Hunter Biden has acknowledged the device contained records from a period when he was in active addiction, while separately challenging the laptop's provenance and chain of custody in a July social media post, KFOX reports.
Base founder Jesse Pollak said on X Wednesday, September 9, 2026, that the $LAPTOP team had approached Base before launch, but the network made what he called a conscious decision not to help design or promote the token, as reported by Cointribune. Base is a public Ethereum Layer-2 network built by Coinbase that provides infrastructure for token launches without endorsing them, the outlet notes, and Pollak's comments served to distance the underlying blockchain from the project once backlash mounted.
A Token Built Around Burns and Backlash
Project tokenomics published this month describe $LAPTOP as having a fixed supply of 1 billion tokens, with 30% reserved for founders under a six-month lockup, 20% earmarked for community airdrops, and up to 30% tied to event-based supply burns — including a potential trigger tied to a 2028 Democratic presidential victory, according to Bankless. Roughly 35% of the total supply reportedly unlocked on the coin's first day of trading, per that same report.
The rollout was not without friction before a single token changed hands. Crypto exchange Kraken deleted a promotional post for $LAPTOP after user backlash, and independent journalist Andrew Callaghan's Channel 5 media team publicly distanced itself from the project after initial Wall Street Journal reports claimed Callaghan's subscriber list was tied to planned token distributions, according to FinanceFeeds.
Digital investigator Stephen Findeisen, better known online as Coffeezilla, publicly blasted the token before launch, calling it a shitcoin and urging his followers not to buy in, per CoinGape. Coffeezilla also flagged what he saw as a contradiction: Hunter Biden had previously called Donald Trump's crypto businesses corruption, according to KFOX, before launching a speculative token of his own, per CoinGape's reporting. Eric Trump also criticized the $LAPTOP launch, KFOX reports.
No Utility, No Promises, Explicit Disclaimers
Official disclosures released around the launch described $LAPTOP explicitly as a digital collectible carrying no utility, profit-sharing, or voting rights, and warned buyers that neither Biden nor the project's organizers would work to increase its value, according to ZeroHedge. The outlet notes that meme coins are often accompanied by risk and lack-of-utility disclaimers. Hunter Biden has described $LAPTOP as a way to reclaim a symbol that was used against him, according to KFOX, though critics have zeroed in on his entry into a high-risk market that even backers acknowledge is driven more by online hype than real-world utility, per that same reporting.
The coin's design also nodded to prior political meme coin casualties. A portion of the token supply was explicitly earmarked for wallets that had lost money on Donald Trump's $TRUMP coin, according to GV Wire. Blockchain analytics firm Nansen found that nearly 1 million investors had suffered cumulative losses of $3.81 billion on $TRUMP through June, after that token fell approximately 97% from a reported peak of $75.35 to $1.76 by early July 2026, per GV Wire's analysis.
A Pattern of Political Coin Collapses
Donald Trump's 2025 financial disclosure reported a $636 million payout connected to Donald Trump's cryptocurrency ventures, according to annual financial disclosures cited by Quartz — a figure the outlet contrasts sharply with the losses retail buyers of political meme coins have absorbed. Trump launched $TRUMP in January 2025, just three days before his second inauguration, Quartz notes.
$LAPTOP's crash fits a broader pattern among celebrity political tokens. Former New York City Mayor Eric Adams's $NYC coin plummeted 75% after its January 2026 launch, and Adams faced rug-pull allegations after a connected wallet withdrew $2.5 million shortly following the coin's debut, according to Forbes. Melania Trump's own token collapsed to $0.11, Forbes reports.
The wave of failures has drawn attention on Capitol Hill. In August, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Richard Blumenthal sent a formal letter urging the SEC to investigate political meme coins for potential fraud and rug-pull risks, citing billions of dollars in retail losses tied to political tokens, according to MetaMask. The senators expressed concern over insider enrichment in what they characterized as novelty digital assets, the report states. Whether the SEC will act on that request remains an open question, and the dossier of reporting reviewed for this story does not indicate any enforcement decision has been made.
