Hunter Biden publishes $LAPTOP accounting, blames market makers for 98% crash

Hunter Biden has released a forensic accounting of his $LAPTOP memecoin. It is coming nearly a month after the token crashed by over 98% on launch day, and Biden is stating that it was never a rug pull.

According to him, the hired market makers, not his team, walked off with the money.

Not a rug pull, Biden says

The token was built on Base and went live on Sept. 9 at 5 cents. Within two minutes, it rose to about $317 before collapsing. 

The son of former president Joe Biden wrote in a thread on X that the founding team still held 300 million tokens out of the one-billion total supply. He pointed out that none of the tokens have moved, sharing onchain data. He said that those holdings are locked for six months and would vest over two years.

Sharing reasons on why he launched the memecoin, Biden wrote, “Trump’s coin was max extraction, and I wanted to troll every grift like it.” He also stated that he hoped it could help some charities that he cared about as well.  

To that effect, he said his team committed to a lockup, published a MiCA disclosure, and set aside 5% of tokens for charity. 

Biden also stated that he kept the project going “just to piss off Don and Eric,” a reference to Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump.

Where does the report say the money went?

Biden’s team commissioned a Delaware-based intelligence consultancy, Groom Lake, to run the accounting report. The firm reviewed every trade in the first 36 hours, and its findings have been posted on the memecoin’s website.

It was revealed in the findings that two unnamed professional trading firms, which were labeled Market Maker 1 and Market Maker 2 in the report, benefited the most.

One wallet tied to Market Maker 1 received $500,000 before launch but deployed only about $5,200, roughly 1% of it, into the opening pool, the report found. That left the market so thin that a $6 buy could move the quoted price up 5%, and the whole pool opened with fewer than 30,000 tokens, about 0.003% of total supply. 

According to Groom Lake, Market Maker 1 pulled its liquidity 84 seconds after the price peaked. As a result, the cash available to sellers near the live price crashed from $16,157 to zero. 

The firm calculated that Market Maker 1’s liquidity positions ended around $686,000 ahead, while trading linked to Market Maker 2 took in about $2.18 million more than it spent. 

Biden takes the failure personally

According to blockchain analytics firm Bubblemaps, about 80% of traders who bought on launch day lost money, with more than 15,000 wallets ending up underwater. One buyer that was tracked by Lookonchain reportedly spent around $200,000 near the peak, and a few hours later, they were left with about $3,000.

Biden called on the market maker, who said he botched the launch, to “buy it all back and burn it.” He wrote, “But in the end, it’s my responsibility,” while adding, “I take the failure personally.” His team plans to keep burning unclaimed airdrop tokens.

A mirror held up to TRUMP

Biden has been a critic of the Trump family’s crypto business, World Liberty Financial. In August, he called it “corruption at a scale we’ve never seen.” 

President Trump launched his own Official Trump (TRUMP) memecoin days before taking office in January 2025; the advocacy group Public Citizen estimated TRUMP investors are down about $3.2 billion since then and pegged losses across five Trump-linked crypto products at $4.7 billion.