$LOP
Hunter Biden, the son of former President Joe Biden, announced the launch of the $LAPTOP memecoin, which debuted on the Base blockchain on September 9, 2026. The token is named after the laptop that was central to the 2020 political controversy and was designed partly to target investors who lost money on Donald Trump’s $TRUMP coin, with 20% of the supply airdropped to those wallets.
The launch was a significant failure; the token crashed within minutes of trading beginning, as the market maker provided only $5,000 in liquidity against high initial demand. This resulted in 80% of buyers suffering losses, while one mystery trader reportedly made nearly $1 million. Biden subsequently posted an expletive-laced video blaming the "f- - - up" on the market maker’s liquidity supply.
Despite suspicions, there is no confirmed evidence that Hunter Biden personally profited from the $LAPTOP launch. Biden stated, "I, personally, have not made a single dollar," and that "nobody on our side sold, and nobody could have," citing a lock on the team's token allocation. Hunter and co-founders were allocated 30% of the 1 billion token supply, but these tokens are described as locked and pre-programmed to be either burned (if certain public events occur) or donated to charity. So even if the launch was structured to benefit insiders, the tokens couldn't be sold during the crash.
The one person who clearly profited (the “mystery trader”), turning ~$250,000 into ~$1.18 million (a gain of roughly $930,000 before fees) within minutes, is unidentified. Datavault AI's analysis, which flagged the trade, has not established that this was Biden or anyone connected to the project. Neither has a regulatory or legal finding of fraud or rug-pull been made against Biden or the project. The rug pull characterization likely comes from Datavault AI CEO Nathaniel Bradley, who called the launch "fraudulent," but that is an opinion, not a determination.
In short: even accepting the rug-pull framing, the value extracted by the mystery trader (~$930K) is the only confirmed profit, and its connection to Biden is unproven. Biden's claimed personal gain is $0. At the same time, Hunter Biden did not have the technical skills to coordinate the launch of his coin without assistance, which suggests that his collaborators may have used him in a scheme to extract such value as could be obtained. Indeed, the hypothesis is not only possible but, in some respects, the more parsimonious explanation. Several details from the project's own disclosures and on-chain data are worth flagging.
1. The token was never technically "Biden's." It is issued by Phoenix Veritas Foundation, a memberless Cayman Islands foundation company, and Phoenix Veritas Ventures Ltd, a British Virgin Islands company. The foundation's named Director is Bryce Howarth and its Supervisor is Luis Power (not Biden). These are the legal controllers of the entities that minted and distributed the token.
2. Profits flow to an undisclosed entity. The project's own disclosures state that "any profit generated by the foundation (after paying project related expenses) will be transferred to TTM Media Group LLC, an entity owned and controlled by the Founders." The "Founders" are referenced in the plural throughout the documentation, but no one other than Biden is publicly named.
3. Pre-launch token distribution was extensive. On-chain records show a project multisig (shared wallet) received 100 million tokens (10% of total supply) seven days before trading opened and had already moved ~42.5 million of them. Market maker GSR received 15.5 million four days prior, Wintermute ~1.8 million in a hot wallet, and 14.5 million went to an unlabeled address just two hours before the open. Whoever controlled that multisig had full discretion over when and where tokens moved.
4. The liquidity was absurdly thin. GSR — a major, established market maker — provided only $5,000 in liquidity against a token that briefly traded at a $1.6 billion fully diluted valuation. No legitimate launch with that level of public attention would go live with that ratio. Either the market maker was deliberately constrained, or the constraint was part of the design.
Biden is an artist and recovering addict, not a smart-contract developer or crypto operator. His visible contributions were posting the ticker and date on X, producing a video montage, and writing Substack posts. The actual work — drafting a MiCA whitepaper, commissioning a Hacken audit, structuring a Cayman/BVI corporate chain, configuring an ERC-20 contract with a 30-event burn mechanism, negotiating with GSR and Wintermute, and operating a multisig with hardware-secured keystones, was done by people whose names appear only in the corporate filings.
What cuts the other way is the 6-month lockup and 24-month vesting on the 30% founder allocation, the burn-or-charity mechanism, and the absence of mint/pause/blacklist functions in the contract, all features that make a classic rug pull harder to execute. A pure exit-liquidity scheme would typically avoid those constraints. The crash is also consistent with a genuinely botched market-maker setup rather than a deliberate pump-and-dump.
The bottom line is the corporate structure, the undisclosed "Founders" behind TTM Media Group LLC, the pre-launch token distribution to an unidentified address, and the inexplicably thin liquidity together create a plausible pathway by which the people who actually built and operated the launch could have extracted value, while Biden's name and likeness served as the marketing engine.
Whether that is what actually happened, or whether the disaster was simply the result of incompetence and a market maker that underprepared, cannot be determined from the public record. The identity of the mystery trader who turned ~$250K into ~$1.18M, and the identity of the "Founders" beyond Biden who control TTM Media Group LLC, are the two facts that would most directly resolve the question—and neither has been established.