Hunter Biden's memecoin LAPTOP shed more than 95 percent of its value within a single hour of trading on Base, and a wallet-level analysis by Bubblemaps shows that 12,151 of its 15,206 buyers ended up losing money.

A memecoin is a token with no utility of its own; its price rests entirely on attention and early speculation. Donald Trump's TRUMP coin had already carried that pattern into the political arena. LAPTOP, which runs on Base — the Layer-2 network operated by Coinbase — follows the same script. The Wall Street Journal reported on the plans first, and Biden subsequently confirmed the ticker in a post on X. Shortly before launch, he positioned his project against the TRUMP coin, which he called a "grift."

Trading opened on September 9, 2026, shortly after 08:00 ET. The price peaked two minutes later, and the fully diluted valuation briefly touched roughly USD 144 billion.

How losses spread across 15,206 wallets

Bubblemaps reviewed every address that bought the token after launch. In total, 12,151 of the 15,206 wallets — roughly 80 percent — ended up under water. Another 3,026 addresses turned a profit, while 29 sat at break-even or resisted assessment. For most of the losing majority, however, the damage remained modest: 11,311 wallets lost less than USD 1,000 each.

Larger losses were far rarer. Some 726 addresses lost between USD 1,000 and USD 10,000, 112 lost between USD 10,000 and USD 100,000, and two wallets lost between USD 100,000 and USD 1 million.

On the winning side stand 88 addresses with combined gains of roughly USD 5.57 million. Ten of them took home between USD 100,000 and USD 1 million each, and a further 78 landed between USD 10,000 and USD 100,000. Fewer than 0.6 percent of buyers therefore divided that USD 5.57 million among themselves.

Across all 15,206 wallets, the aggregate balance comes to roughly plus USD 178,000. A clear majority of losers, in other words, still leaves a slight net gain — but the figure describes no market profit. It describes redistribution: the many small losses of late buyers financed the few very large gains captured in the first minutes.

Freshly funded wallets bought ahead of launch

The origin of the largest holders stands out. Around 60 percent of them used addresses that received funds only in the ten days before the launch, and most of those wallets obtained their capital on the very day trading opened. That clustering immediately before the start is striking, though it does not, by itself, force the conclusion of coordinated insider dealing.

Market depth was extremely thin at launch. The official pool on Aerodrome held roughly 83,000 USDC, and a second pool on Uniswap around USD 380,000 — yet only about USD 48,000 of that was effectively available when trading opened. Both pools therefore carried far more nominal value than the market could actually absorb, and in a market that narrow, even small orders move the price noticeably. The fully diluted valuation, meanwhile, is simply the last traded price multiplied by total supply; it says nothing about how much capital actually flowed into the token.

On-chain data from the first minutes of trading illustrates the spread of outcomes. One address put in 900 USDC and bought 2,268.56 LAPTOP at roughly USD 0.40, later selling the position for 251,270 USDC at an average of about USD 111 — a return of roughly 278 times. A second wallet invested 100 ETH, worth around USD 249,800 at the time, and unwound 8,480 of its 9,124 tokens for 472 ETH, or roughly USD 1.18 million.

Late entrants saw the mirror image. A third address withdrew USD 250,000 from Binance and spent USD 200,000 of it on 919 tokens at an average price of about USD 218. Shortly afterwards, the position was worth around USD 3,000 — an unrealized loss of roughly USD 197,000.

Only 2 percent of supply goes to TRUMP losers

Total supply stands at 1 billion tokens. Thirty percent goes to the founders, including Biden, locked for six months and released over the two years after that. Another 30 percent is tied to 30 predefined political and cultural events: if they occur, the project burns the tokens in question and removes them from circulation permanently; if not, they go to charities. Five percent flows directly into donations, and 20 percent is reserved for two community airdrops.

That community share carries the political narrative of the project, which says it is meant to compensate wallets that lost money on the TRUMP coin. Coverage focused mostly on the headline 20 percent figure, but according to the project, only 2 percent of total supply is actually reserved for TRUMP losers — one tenth of the community block. The lock-up on the founder allocation does prevent Biden from selling immediately. It protected no ordinary buyer, however, from the losses of the first minutes of trading.

Biden explained the project's name with the political history of the device.

"They turned the laptop into a weapon. I turned it into a token." — Hunter Biden

TRUMP investors sit on USD 3.81 billion in losses

The comparison case supplies the order of magnitude. According to a Nansen review from summer 2026, roughly 988,905 wallets sat on cumulative losses in the TRUMP coin, which added up to USD 3.81 billion. At that point the token's price stood around 97 percent below its high — though there, the decline stretched out over months rather than a single hour.

Biden had publicly criticized the TRUMP coin as a "grift" before launching his own token, while at the same time admitting that he understood the cynicism toward memecoins. His own coin nevertheless produced the same distribution: a small group of early addresses collected very large gains while a broad mass carried small losses. Neither the lock-up nor the announced airdrop changed that.

The outcome, then, is neither party-bound nor person-bound. It follows from the mechanics of thin launch liquidity, where the first seconds decide how gains and losses are distributed. Political memecoins ultimately supply only the attention that draws enough late buyers into the market.