Hunter Biden has found a new way to monetize the laptop that haunted his family for years: turn it into a cryptocurrency.
There was just one problem.
The coin promptly collapsed.
Biden launched his $LAPTOP meme coin Wednesday, transforming one of the most notorious political controversies of the 2020 election into a speculative crypto token. Within its first hour of trading, the coin had plunged roughly 98 percent from its early peak.
You could hardly script the symbolism better.
The token takes its name from the laptop Biden left at a Delaware computer repair shop in 2019, whose contents later became a major political controversy. Biden announced the project by posting “$LAPTOP September 9” alongside a video referencing years of media coverage surrounding the computer. The token operates on Base, the blockchain network built by Coinbase.
Biden has attempted to frame the project as an act of reclamation.
“They turned laptop into a weapon. I turned it into a token,” he wrote while promoting the project. He described $LAPTOP as being about “resilience, redemption and recovery,” while insisting buyers should not expect him or anyone else involved to make the token more valuable.
That warning turned out to be remarkably well timed.
CoinDesk reported that $LAPTOP shot as high as $190.81 during its first two minutes of trading before plunging below $4 less than an hour later. It was trading around $4.77 after the first hour, approximately 98 percent below its intraday peak.
The project had already generated skepticism before a single token changed hands.
CoinDesk reported that founders, including Biden, were allocated 30 percent of the one-billion-token supply, subject to lockups and vesting. Another 20 percent was designated for airdrops, including distributions to wallets that lost money holding President Donald Trump’s own TRUMP meme coin. Crypto traders reacted harshly enough that Kraken deleted a promotional post about $LAPTOP, while journalist Andrew Callaghan distanced himself from the project after his audience was included in a planned distribution.
There were also substantial token movements before public trading began. A wallet identified by Arkham as associated with the project received 100 million tokens seven days before launch, while millions more were transferred to market makers. Another 14.5 million tokens were transferred to an unidentified address roughly two hours before trading opened, although CoinDesk noted that pre-launch allocations to market makers are standard practice and that the recipient of the unidentified transfer was unknown.
Perhaps the strangest element is that Biden is now deliberately monetizing an episode he once endured as an enormous personal and political liability.
In July, Biden publicly addressed the laptop’s contents and his struggles with addiction, acknowledging that deeply embarrassing messages, photographs and other material were indeed on the device. “I am not denying any of it,” he wrote.
Now the laptop is not merely something Biden acknowledges.
It is a brand.
And on its first day, the market delivered a rather brutal verdict: a token named after Hunter Biden’s most infamous computer managed to lose roughly 98 percent of its peak value in about the time it takes to watch an episode of television.
Whatever else $LAPTOP ultimately becomes, its opening act was difficult to miss.
Hunter Biden finally turned the laptop into money.
Then the price disappeared.