Hunter Biden, son of former US President Joe Biden, has released a full accounting of the $LAPTOP memecoin he helped launch last month, a token named after the laptop at the center of a long-running political controversy. Memecoins — tokens typically built around jokes or cultural references and valued mostly on community sentiment — are a fixture of crypto markets, and their launch practices have been a recurring source of industry controversy.

In a series of X posts on Wednesday, Biden shared blockchain data showing that 300 million tokens held in wallets associated with the project's founders "haven't moved since launch." He acknowledged that charts tracking the token's price "looked like every celebrity rug ever" following its Sept. 9 debut, and said the biggest beneficiaries were two unnamed market makers — described as "two professional trading firms" hired by the project to supply liquidity on exchanges — that withdrew their funds seconds after the token peaked at roughly $317.

According to Biden's posts, one market maker earned $686,000 from liquidity positions on decentralized exchanges, while the other "took in about $2.18 million more than it spent" through trading.

Comparable figures appeared in a "launch report" prepared by Groom Lake, a Delaware-based intelligence consultancy, and published on the memecoin's official website. "The money for sellers was pulled right after the peak," the report on $LAPTOP stated. "Eighty-four seconds after the price topped out, Market Maker 1 withdrew its money. The cash available to people trying to sell near the current price dropped from $16,157 to zero."

Biden framed the project as a deliberate response to President Donald Trump's own token: "Here's why I did this. Trump's coin was max extraction, and I wanted to troll every grift like it. So we were transparent, committed the team to a lock up and published a MiCA disclosure. And I hoped it could help some charities I care about too." The MiCA disclosure he referenced points to the European Union's Markets in Crypto-Assets framework, the bloc's rulebook for how crypto tokens are issued and disclosed to the public.

While Biden said he intends to dedicate 5% of the token supply to charity, he added that a further motivation was "just to piss off Don and Eric" — a reference to Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, sons of US President Donald Trump — as well as "every [Key Opinion Leader] who called it a scam because we refused to pay them."

The memecoin takes its name from the laptop computer whose existence and contents drew intense media scrutiny ahead of the 2020 US presidential election, in which Trump ran against Biden's father. The laptop has continued to be invoked by many right-wing figures and was the subject of two privacy-related lawsuits filed by Biden.

Biden has been a vocal critic of the Trump family's crypto company World Liberty Financial, calling it "corruption at a scale we've never seen" in August. President Trump faces criticism of his own for launching Official Trump (TRUMP) shortly before taking office in January 2025, a token that has drawn rug pull and corruption accusations of its own.

According to Biden, the $LAPTOP founder allocations will remain locked for six months after launch, and the team will continue burning unclaimed tokens from airdrops. Because those claims rest on public blockchain data, the founder wallets can be monitored directly as the six-month lockup clock runs down.

Trump to host another memecoin event amid controversy

Whether launched to hold up a mirror to rug pull projects, as a joke, or to troll the Trump family, Biden's token could shine a spotlight on the president's crypto ventures as Trump prepares to speak at another event for his memecoin holders. The back-and-forth shows how memecoins have become entangled in US politics, where a token launch can double as a political statement and an accusation aimed at rivals.

Last week, the group behind the $TRUMP memecoin announced that the president will appear at his golf club in Washington, DC, alongside three unnamed speakers and the top 185 tokenholders, for a dinner on Nov. 22.

Public Citizen, a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization, has estimated that $TRUMP memecoin investors lost $3.2 billion since the token's 2025 launch.