Hunter Biden launched a cryptocurrency named after the laptop scandal that dogged his family for years, and watched it lose nearly all its value in a single afternoon.
The token, called $LAPTOP, debuted Wednesday and surged from roughly $3 to over $300 in its opening minutes before collapsing to approximately $1.36 by mid-afternoon, The Hill reported. The crash wiped out roughly 95 percent of the coin's value within hours, leaving anyone who bought near the top holding a fraction of what they paid.
The coin's name references the personal laptop Hunter Biden left at a Delaware computer repair shop in 2019, the same device whose contents, first reported by the New York Post in 2020, exposed years of overseas business dealings and personal conduct that fueled sustained Republican scrutiny of the Biden family. Now the younger Biden has tried to monetize the very scandal that once threatened his father's presidency, and the market's verdict arrived fast.
Price data from Coinmarketcap.com showed $LAPTOP opening around $37 and climbing to approximately $222 within its first hour. The New York Post reported the spike was even steeper at one point, with the coin briefly clearing $300 before the bottom fell out. By the time the dust settled, the price sat around $2.60, a near-total collapse.
The pattern is familiar to anyone who watched political meme coins launch and implode over the past two years. President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump both launched meme coins that similarly plummeted in value after their debuts. Biden acknowledged that history the day before his own coin went live.
In a social media post on X, Biden tried to preempt the obvious criticism:
"But why would I ever want to support a meme coin? Why something that has been so misused by grifters? I understand the cynicism."
He then pivoted to Trump, writing that the president "has broken trust in everything he's ever touched. And his token was no exception." In a separate post, Biden struck a defiant note. "They turned laptop into a weapon. I turned it into a token," Breitbart reported him writing on X ahead of the launch.
The self-awareness did not save investors from the crash.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the distribution plan called for 1 billion $LAPTOP tokens to be issued. Recipients were to include the coin's founders, crypto wallet owners who lost money on Trump's meme coin, subscribers to Biden's Substack newsletter, and people on a mailing list maintained by Andrew Callaghan, a friend of Biden's.
The New York Post added a critical detail: Hunter Biden and his co-founders were set to receive 30 percent of the total token supply, locked for six months. That means the people behind the coin stood to hold 300 million tokens, a staggering share that would give insiders enormous control over the market once the lockup expired.
The arrangement raises an obvious question. Biden called Trump's token a product of broken trust and dismissed meme coins as tools "misused by grifters." Then he launched one with a structure that reserved nearly a third of the supply for himself and his partners. The gap between the rhetoric and the tokenomics is hard to miss.
Hunter Biden's willingness to cash in on his own family's scandals fits a pattern. He has spent recent months publicly airing grievances about his father's presidency, including calling Merrick Garland his father's "greatest mistake" as attorney general.
Callaghan's company, whose name was not identified in reporting, moved quickly to separate itself from the wreckage. The company issued a statement saying Callaghan has "nothing to do with" $LAPTOP and that Biden had simply used a mailing list the company provided to "expand his audience."
The company went further, adding a pointed disclaimer about the entire asset class:
"As we have told our followers numerous times, we do not believe crypto is a legitimate investment."
That statement amounts to a friend's business publicly warning its own audience that the product Biden promoted through its list is not worth buying. It is the kind of distancing that happens when the association becomes a liability.
The Biden family's public difficulties have extended well beyond crypto. Hunter Biden has made headlines for revealing that Joe Biden once drove to his Washington crack house in a Secret Service motorcade, among other disclosures that have kept the family in the news for all the wrong reasons.
Breitbart reported that 100 million tokens, 10 percent of the total supply, were distributed to market makers and an unknown address before trading even opened. An additional 14.5 million tokens went to an unidentified address roughly two hours before the public launch.
Those pre-launch transfers mean a significant chunk of $LAPTOP was already in circulation, in unknown hands, before ordinary buyers could place their first trade. In the meme coin world, that kind of early distribution often precedes a "pump and dump", insiders ride the initial surge and sell before the price collapses.
No regulatory body has publicly commented on or taken action regarding $LAPTOP. Whether the Securities and Exchange Commission or any other agency views the token as falling within its jurisdiction remains an open question.
On his Substack, Biden acknowledged the laptop's contents directly. "So. The laptop. Here is what was on it. Twenty years of my life, or a version of it," he wrote. He added bluntly: "I am not denying any of it." That admission, years after Democrats and allied media spent months dismissing the laptop story as Russian disinformation, is itself a remarkable concession, even if Biden now treats it as branding material rather than a source of accountability.
Meanwhile, the broader Biden legacy continues to take hits from unexpected directions. Even Kamala Harris recently declined to name Joe Biden among the most effective presidents, a quiet snub that underscored how far the family's political standing has fallen.
The reaction from the Trump family was swift. Eric Trump took to X to mock the failed launch with a single line: "Hunter should go back to painting." The jab referenced Hunter Biden's much-ridiculed art career, in which his paintings sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars to anonymous buyers, transactions that drew ethics complaints during his father's presidency.
The comparison between the Trump and Biden meme coins is worth noting, though the two situations are not identical. Trump's coin also lost significant value after launch. But Trump launched his coin as a sitting president with an enormous built-in audience. Biden launched his as a private citizen trading on a scandal, one he spent years trying to minimize before deciding to monetize it.
The Biden family's recent public conduct has increasingly resembled a series of attempts to revise history and extract value from a political legacy that ended in defeat. The $LAPTOP coin fits that pattern precisely.
Hunter Biden spent years insisting the laptop story was a political weapon used against his family. Now he has turned it into a get-rich-quick scheme that left buyers holding the bag. The cynicism he claimed to understand turned out to be his business model.