Hunter Biden’s controversial LAPTOP meme coin hit the crypto market on Wednesday morning and immediately did what most “celebrity meme coins” have done before it: it pumped, then it dumped.

The token, named for the Delaware laptop saga that dogged Biden through the 2020 election and years after, launched on Base—Coinbase’s Ethereum layer-2 network—at 8am ET Wednesday.

Blockchain intelligence firm Arkham reported that LAPTOP topped out at $190.81 just two minutes later, a peak that implied a fully diluted valuation near $144 billion against a liquidity pool holding only $48,000.

That gap between the valuation and actual tradable liquidity set up the collapse. Within 30 minutes, LAPTOP had shed about 90% of its value, and by the one-hour mark it traded near $4.77. The chart below—LAPTOP against USD on GeckoTerminal—shows the pattern: a single green candle straight up, followed by an immediate red reversal and a long, flattening tail.

By afternoon, the token had stabilized in the low single digits, changing hands around $1.97—down nearly 99% from its intraday high—but still up double digits on some short intervals as thin trading kept the price bouncing. That’s enough for a $780 million market capitalization, and a $2.2 billion fully diluted valuation, placing it within the top 100 crypto assets by market cap.

On-chain trackers caught both sides of the trade in real time. The ones who dumped as quickly as they could, are the ones who profited from the launch. One wallet pulled $249,800 from Binance ahead of launch, bought 9,124 LAPTOP, then sold most of the position minutes later for roughly $1.18 million.

Another trader wasn’t as lucky. The trader spent about $200,000 to buy 919 LAPTOP near $218 a token, a position worth less than $3,000 an hour later, per the same tracking. The gap between the two outcomes came down almost entirely to timing measured in seconds, not minutes.

Politics, bearish politics

LAPTOP’s launch-day arc tracks almost exactly what happened to the two most prominent political meme coins that came before it. President Donald Trump’s own TRUMP token peaked near $75 shortly after its January 2025 launch and now trades around $2.24, a decline of roughly 97% from its high.

Nearly a million holders collectively lost an estimated $3.81 billion on the coin.

Melania Trump’s coin followed a similar path, crashing more than 99% from its own peak. Biden built LAPTOP’s tokenomics around that history directly, setting aside a slice of the token’s airdrop for wallets that lost money holding TRUMP.

Decrypt flagged this exact outcome as the most likely scenario before LAPTOP even launched, noting that political and celebrity tokens reliably draw a fast first wave of buyers regardless of how the internet feels about the person behind them, while the second wave—the one that decides whether a token becomes a headline or a punchline—has gone badly more often than not.

Investor Mark Cuban’s line, that every meme coin is “a rug pull in the works,” seems to be the operating assumption crypto traders bring to launches like this one.

Too early to call it

The first hours of trading lined up with a pump-and-dump pattern: a concentrated supply, thin liquidity, a rapid spike driven by snipers and bots, and a crash once early buyers took profit. That reading fits everything visible in the chart and the on-chain data so far, but is not unexpected and seems to be part of many launch events.

Just for reference, SpaceX (the world’s largest IPO) has been trading under its listing price for most of the time it has been on the market, meaning most of its retail owners have been in the red since the IPO, and not a single trader who bought SPCX during the first week of its launch is currently in profit.

Considering this, a token that has already fallen nearly 99% from its peak has limited room left to fall much further in percentage terms, and LAPTOP’s tokenomics still have mechanisms—a six-month lockup on founder tokens, a 30-event burn schedule, and staggered airdrop rounds—that play out over months, not hours.

Whether Wednesday’s opening spike was the whole story or just the first chapter depends on how the token trades once the launch-day snipers move on and the actual claim-and-hold behavior of TRUMP-loss airdrop recipients starts to show up in the data.