Hunter Biden’s LAPTOP memecoin plunged as much as 98% from its launch price, with the project blaming the sharp reversal on automated sniper bots and limited liquidity. Early Nansen data showed that some traders were left carrying losses of more than $100,000.
LAPTOP entered the market at 5 cents and attracted strong initial demand. However, the project team said the amount of liquidity available at launch was insufficient to handle the wave of automated buying that followed.
Sniper bots are designed to monitor new token launches and execute trades within seconds, giving them an advantage over ordinary traders. LAPTOP’s price surged rapidly after going live before reversing just as sharply.
In an effort to improve market liquidity, the team said it plans to introduce another 4 million LAPTOP tokens, representing 0.4% of the total supply, as incentives for liquidity providers on Aerodrome pools starting Sept. 10.
Nansen data reveals heavy trading losses
Blockchain analytics firm Nansen provided CoinDesk with early trading data covering the token’s first 24 hours.
The data showed 46,675 purchases compared with 16,038 sales, involving 20,085 unique buyers and 8,714 unique sellers. Most of those who purchased LAPTOP had not yet sold their holdings.
Nansen analyzed five wallets in particular. One wallet was estimated to have lost about $199,000 in total, including $171,000 in realized losses and another $27,900 in unrealized losses.
Another wallet accumulated roughly 28,400 LAPTOP without selling and was sitting on an estimated loss of around $118,000.
There were also profitable holders. One wallet that purchased approximately 49,700 LAPTOP had an unrealized gain of about $13,000 at the time of Nansen’s snapshot.
Even following the collapse, Nansen estimated LAPTOP’s market capitalization at approximately $720 million and its fully diluted valuation at around $2.1 billion.
However, such valuations can be unreliable for newly launched tokens with shallow liquidity. A relatively small transaction can cause a large price movement in a thin market, meaning the implied market cap may not reflect the actual amount of money invested in the token.
Team rejects insider-access allegations
LAPTOP’s developers also pushed back against accusations that insiders received preferential treatment during the launch.
The team said the project did not conduct a presale and did not distribute allocations to investors, influencers or key opinion leaders. It added that the contract address, token allocation information, security audit and other relevant disclosures were made available before trading began.
“Everyone had the same information, at the same time,” the project said in a blog post published Thursday.
The team also reiterated the terms surrounding the founders’ 30% allocation. Those tokens are locked for six months and will subsequently vest over a two-year period.
A further 30% of LAPTOP’s supply is connected to a prediction mechanism. Tokens associated with the outcomes of specified events will either be burned or donated to charity, depending on the result.
From political scandal to tradable asset
LAPTOP takes its name from the laptop Hunter Biden left at a Delaware repair shop in 2019. The contents of the device became a recurring subject of Republican criticism of his father, Joe Biden, during two presidential election cycles.
Hunter Biden confirmed the memecoin on X on Monday, sharing its ticker alongside a montage of television news coverage about the project. The token effectively transformed an object linked to a major political controversy into a cryptocurrency that could be traded in the market.
The launch was met with criticism from crypto traders even before trading began, with several members of the community publicly urging Hunter Biden to abandon the project.
