Hunter Biden has released a forensic accounting of his $LAPTOP memecoin, published nearly a month after the token lost more than 98% of its value on launch day. In the report and in posts on X, Biden insists the project was never a rug pull, arguing that the market makers his team hired — not his own group — walked off with the money.

Not a rug pull, Biden says

The token was built on Base, an Ethereum layer-2 network, and went live on Sept. 9 at 5 cents. Within two minutes, it climbed to roughly $317 before collapsing.

Writing in a thread on X, the son of former President Joe Biden said the founding team still holds 300 million tokens out of the one-billion total supply. He shared onchain data showing that none of those tokens have moved, and said the holdings are locked for six months and will vest over two years.

Explaining why he launched the memecoin, Biden wrote, "Trump's coin was max extraction, and I wanted to troll every grift like it." He added that he hoped it could help charities he cared about. To that effect, he said his team committed to a lockup, published a disclosure under MiCA — the European Union's Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation — and set aside 5% of the 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 the report says the money went

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

The findings showed that two unnamed professional trading firms, labeled Market Maker 1 and Market Maker 2 in the report, benefited the most. Market makers are the firms projects hire to keep a new token tradable, quoting standing buy and sell orders so holders always have someone to trade against — which also means they control how deep the market is on each side.

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 entire 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 — with the standing bids gone, anyone trying to exit had nowhere to sell near the price they had seen quoted.

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

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

Biden called on the market maker he blames for botching the launch to "buy it all back and burn it." He wrote, "But in the end, it's my responsibility," adding, "I take the failure personally." His team plans to keep burning unclaimed airdrop tokens. Because every one of those claims sits on a public blockchain, the report's numbers can be checked against the onchain record: whether the team's 300 million tokens stay locked through the six-month lockup, and whether the two trading firms ever respond to the findings, will be the next markers to watch.

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 has estimated that TRUMP investors are down about $3.2 billion since then, and pegged losses across five Trump-linked crypto products at $4.7 billion.