One is preparing to launch a "political meme coin," while the other is preparing to abandon its Layer 1 after 7 years.
In the past 24 hours, the Crypto market witnessed two seemingly unrelated pieces of news:
Hunter Biden is preparing to launch a meme coin named LAPTOP on Base; meanwhile, the established project Harmony intends to shut down its Layer 1, migrating ONE to Ethereum and shifting its focus to AI video.
One is creating a new narrative, while the other is concluding an old narrative.
However, looking at these two matters together reveals a significant change in the current Crypto market:
"The blockchain itself" is becoming increasingly difficult to be the endpoint of the story; what is truly scarce is attention, users, and application scenarios.
Hunter Biden also starts issuing "political meme coins"
According to reports, Hunter Biden plans to launch LAPTOP on Base on September 9, with a total supply of 1 billion coins, the name directly derived from the politically controversial "laptop" incident in the United States. The project also designs a token burn mechanism related to political events.
The most interesting aspect of this coin is not "the Biden family also starting to do memes."
Rather, it directly binds political figures, internet events, and token economics together.
In the currently disclosed mechanism, the founding team holds about 30% and sets up locking and vesting arrangements; another part of the supply is planned for airdrops, including users who lost on the TRUMP token.
In other words, LAPTOP is not simply replicating a political figure's IP.
It attempts to connect:
Political stance → Community sentiment → Airdrop → Trading → Token burn
Into a complete attention cycle.
Of course, the biggest risk of such memes is also very obvious: The intensity of the narrative often outweighs the fundamentals.
Harmony: Why suddenly shutting down 7-year L1?
Compared to launching meme coins, Harmony's actions are more worthy of industry attention.
Harmony proposed to shut down its Layer 1 and migrate ONE to an ERC-20 asset on Ethereum, while shifting the project's focus to AI video-related business. This plan is currently still a proposal, not a final decision.
The Harmony mainnet has been operational since 2019.
Now, a long-operating L1 actively chooses to abandon its blockchain infrastructure, and the logic behind this is not complicated:
The cost of maintaining an independent L1 is increasingly high, but users and applications may not be enough to support this infrastructure.
More notable is that Harmony has not completely abandoned ONE.
Instead, it plans to:
Shut down L1 → ONE migrating to Ethereum → Project shifting to AI video.
This means the project is transitioning from "I provide a chain," to "I use existing public chain infrastructure to seek new application scenarios."
Harmony also cited recent security incidents and the security risks posed by nation-state attackers and AI agents as important backgrounds for the shutdown.
One issues a coin, one shuts down a chain; behind it is actually the same problem
LAPTOP and Harmony appear to be two completely different stories.
But they are both answering the same question:
What do Crypto projects rely on to gain value today?
The past answer may have been:
"I have my own chain."
Now that answer is becoming weaker.
Ethereum, Solana, Base, and other infrastructures have matured enough that new projects do not need to reconstruct all underlying facilities.
Conversely, meme projects have also proven:
As long as there is enough strong attention, it is possible to quickly create liquidity and trading demand even without a new chain.
Thus, a clear differentiation is emerging in the industry:
Underlying infrastructure is becoming increasingly centralized, while applications and narratives are becoming more fragmented.
Solana takes another path
Solana continues to expand the advantages of its high-performance chain.
Data shows that Solana's transaction volume in July 2026 reached approximately 4.2 billion transactions, while the scale of tokenized real assets on the chain has approached 4 billion USD.
This means that the market's demand for L1 has not disappeared.
But the competition standards have changed.
In the past, the comparison was about:
TPS, low Gas, technical parameters.
Now, more projects genuinely care about:
Are there users, is there capital, are there real applications?
This is also why institutional funds continue to pay attention to BTC, while traditional financial institutions are expanding the scope of digital asset services. Recently, Standard Chartered has launched BTC and ETH spot trading services for institutional clients in the UAE.
Finally: L1 is receding, but Crypto has not stopped expanding
From Hunter Biden's LAPTOP to Harmony shutting down L1, and to Solana continuing to expand, looking at these pieces of news together reveals a trend:
Crypto does not no longer need blockchains, but no longer needs so many "chains that exist just to have a chain."
In the future, truly valuable projects may increasingly emphasize:
"What problem have we actually solved?"
This might be the true takeaway from this round of industry reshuffling.
Chains can be changed, narratives can be changed, even tokens can be changed, but what ultimately remains are users and real demand.
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