Hunter Biden's LAPTOP meme coin launched on Base at 8 a.m. ET Wednesday and reached $190.81 just two minutes later, according to blockchain intelligence firm Arkham. The token then crashed to as low as $3.70 within an hour.

LAPTOP's fully diluted valuation briefly exceeded $144 billion while its liquidity pool held only $48,000, Arkham reported. The valuation later fell to roughly $4.8 billion, highlighting the gap between the token's implied value and the amount of capital available for trading.

The token is named after the Delaware laptop saga that dogged Biden during the 2020 election and in the years that followed. Its launch initially followed a pattern seen repeatedly among celebrity and political meme coins: a rapid price increase followed by a sharp decline.

Arkham posted on X that LAPTOP reached its peak two minutes after launch:

DID LAPTOP TOP IN 2 MINUTES? LAPTOP just launched at 8:02pm. It reached a peak price 2 minutes later at 8:04. The FDV of the coin is currently $144B and the liquidity pool contains $48K. pic.twitter.com/9yvDk6r2sB — Arkham (@arkham) September 9, 2026

Within 30 minutes, LAPTOP had lost about 90% of its value. After one hour, it was trading near $4.77. The token's price chart on GeckoTerminal showed a steep upward move followed by an immediate reversal and a long, flattening decline.

By Wednesday afternoon, LAPTOP had stabilized in the low single digits and was changing hands at around $1.97, down nearly 99% from its intraday high. Thin trading continued to produce double-digit price moves over some short intervals. At that price, the token had a market capitalization of about $780 million and a fully diluted valuation of $2.2 billion, placing it among the top 100 crypto assets by market capitalization.

On-chain trackers recorded both profitable and losing trades during the launch. One wallet withdrew $249,800 from Binance before the launch, purchased 9,124 LAPTOP tokens and sold most of the position minutes later for approximately $1.18 million.

Another trader spent about $200,000 to purchase 919 LAPTOP at close to $218 per token. The position was worth less than $3,000 an hour later, according to the same tracking data. The difference between the two outcomes was determined almost entirely by timing, measured in seconds rather than minutes.

Political meme coins follow a similar pattern

LAPTOP's launch-day performance closely tracked the trajectories of two prominent political meme coins that preceded it. President Donald Trump's TRUMP token reached nearly $75 shortly after launching in January 2025 but was trading at around $2.24, a decline of roughly 97% from its peak. Nearly 1 million holders collectively lost an estimated $3.81 billion on the token.

Melania Trump's token followed a similar path, falling more than 99% from its own high. LAPTOP's tokenomics were built around that history, with a portion of its airdrop reserved for wallets that lost money holding TRUMP.

Before LAPTOP launched, Decrypt identified a rapid rise followed by a steep decline as the most likely outcome. The publication noted that political and celebrity tokens often attract an initial wave of buyers regardless of public opinion about the person associated with the token, while the subsequent trading activity more often produces a negative result.

Investor Mark Cuban has described every meme coin as “a rug pull in the works,” a characterization that reflects the risks traders face during launches with concentrated supply and limited liquidity.

Future performance remains uncertain

The first hours of trading were consistent with a pump-and-dump pattern, featuring concentrated token supply, thin liquidity, a rapid increase potentially driven by snipers and bots, and a decline after early buyers took profits. The pattern is consistent with the chart and on-chain data available so far, although similar movements are common during meme coin launches.

For comparison, the source noted that SpaceX, described as “the world’s largest IPO,” has traded below its listing price for most of the time it has been on the market. It also stated that most retail owners have been in the red since the IPO and that no trader who bought SPCX during the first week of its launch is currently in profit.

LAPTOP has already fallen nearly 99% from its peak, leaving less room for a further percentage decline. However, its tokenomics include mechanisms designed to operate over a longer period, including a six-month lockup on founder tokens, a 30-event burn schedule and staggered airdrop rounds.

The effect of those mechanisms will depend on how LAPTOP trades after the launch-day snipers leave the market and as the claim-and-hold behavior of recipients of the TRUMP-loss airdrop becomes visible in the data.

Original source: https://decrypt.co/377783/hunter-biden-laptop-meme-coin-crashes