Market makers provided only $5,000 in liquidity during the opening phase, with about 80% of buyers in the red.

Written by: Boaz Sobrado, Forbes

Translated by: AididiaoJP, Foresight News

Hunter Biden converted the 2019 "Laptop from Hell" incident into the meme coin $LAPTOP. Days after its launch, the token hit a new low of about $0.30. He attributed the plunge to a market opening error: market makers only injected $5,000 into the liquidity pool in the first 30 seconds. Note: As of the time of writing, LAPTOP has fallen to $0.24.

According to Forbes on September 14, Biden blamed the liquidity arrangement by market makers for a nearly 99% drop on the token's first day. Two days later, the price hit a new low of $0.30; on-chain data showed that about 80% of buyers were still at a loss. This was not an ordinary meme coin flash crash but a typical case of political symbolism, shallow pool market making, and bot front-running overlapping.

1. From Scandal Hardware to On-chain Token

On September 9, $LAPTOP launched on the Coinbase-owned Layer 2 network Base. The name derives from the laptop that he left at a repair shop in Delaware in 2019, which later sparked controversy in the 2020 election. The New York Post reported on this, citing his overseas business dealings and personal materials, with Biden's camp denying the related allegations, leading to years of controversy.

Biden flipped this narrative. He criticized the Trump family's meme coin as a "scam," while packaging his token as a symbol of "resilience, redemption, and recovery," stating on social media: "They turned the laptop into a weapon; I turned it into a token." The project also claimed it would airdrop to wallets that lost money on the TRUMP token. The Trump-related meme coin had previously generated about $636 million last year, but many retail wallets suffered losses in the billions; Melania-related tokens also fell sharply from their peaks. The LAPTOP token targets these loss victims as airdrop recipients, effectively marketing against the wounds from the previous political meme coin.

The total number of tokens is 1 billion. The public plan roughly outlines: about 30% for the founding team, locked up for 6 months before being released over two years; airdrops totaling about 20%, covering TRUMP token loss addresses, Biden Substack subscribers, and friends and related email lists of video reporter Andrew Callahan; about 30% linked to 30 public predictions—if fulfilled, they will be burned; if not fulfilled, they will be donated to charity. Predictions include the Democratic Party winning the White House in 2028, the fully diluted valuation of the LAPTOP token exceeding that of the TRUMP token, and Bitcoin reaching a new high. Remaining portions will be used for liquidity, foundation operations, and charity. The project emphasizes that the token is for entertainment and community participation and does not constitute company equity or asset revenue rights.

2. Opening 30 Seconds: $5,000 Liquidity Meets Overwhelming Demand

The opening was not quiet. Some market data shows that the token started at about $0.05 and surged to over $190 to $220 within minutes, with some records close to $300. Institutions like CoinDesk pointed out that with liquidity supported at only around $48,000, the fully diluted valuation was once pushed up to about $144 billion. This is a typical shallow pool illusion: a small number of trades can push up quotes, but no one can clear all chips at that price.

The peak was very brief. Within half an hour to an hour, the price fell back to a few dollars and then dropped below $1. Data from DexScreener and others indicate that the drop on the first day exceeded 98% to 99%. The next day in the morning, some quotes fell to between $0.79 and $0.84. When Forbes followed up, the price was about $0.30, a drop of over 99% from the intraday high.

In a video on Friday, Biden candidly said, "I messed it up. The problem was in the first 30 seconds after the launch; the market maker, for some reason, only injected $5,000 in liquidity while the demand exploded." This became the core explanation of the event. The project party also pointed to sniper bots: the pool opened at $0.05, and the thin liquidity faced competitive buying from bots, pushing the price up before it was smashed down. Biden denied that the team was dumping, stating that the founder's share was locked and he "didn't make a single dollar." The project's foundation account on X was briefly suspended, and responses were shifted to Medium.

The on-chain picture and verbal explanations do not completely overlap. Tracking showed that addresses marked as market-making or related sold some tokens during the volatility; some analysis also mentioned that the project's related multisig received about 10 million tokens (one-tenth of the total supply) before the launch and subsequently sold some of those. As a result, the market questioned whether the event was simply a "5000 dollars liquidity blunder." But existing public materials still cannot classify every sale as the team's cashing out. Biden insists: the lock-up is still in place, the team has not sold, the problem lies in the execution at the opening.

3. Who Earned the Profits, Who Stayed at the Bottom

Bubblemaps statistics show that of approximately 15,200 trading addresses, about 12,200 are at a loss, with a loss ratio close to 80%; about 3,026 are profitable, with a few holding positions that cannot be priced. Most individual losses are under $1,000: about 11,300 wallets lost under a thousand; about 700 lost over $1,000; about 100 lost over $10,000; and two wallets lost in the $100,000 to $1 million range.

Profits are highly concentrated. CryptoSlate cited data indicating that about 88 wallets collectively earned about $5.6 million. Lookonchain recorded an extreme case: a certain address bought about 2,268 tokens with $900 in stablecoins at a cost of about $0.40 each, then sold them at an average price of about $111, totaling about $251,000, a return of about 278 times. Some wallets also made over $1 million near the peak. Counter-trend buyers are also noteworthy: some traders bought about 28,400 tokens for roughly $5.97, investing about $170,000, and the token continued to drop, expanding their unrealized losses by about 87%.

Actual trading volume in the first hour was not small. Bitquery's statistics on the real coin contract show that there were over 260,000 trades and about 45,000 independent trading addresses within 19 hours after launching, with actual turnover of approximately $47.59 million on the stablecoin and ETH side; the weighted price for the first hour of trading volume was about $23.48, which fell to about $0.79 the next day. The paper market value could soar to hundreds of millions or even billions in a shallow pool, but the depth for cash realization was only a few million or even less. This is exactly what Biden had to explain afterward: quotes are not market value, and market value cannot be relied on slogans to fill liquidity.

4. Over 4,000 Fake Coins, More Lively than Real Coins

The real coin had not stabilized yet, but the fake coins had already spread. After the Wall Street Journal's report and Biden confirmed the launch date, contracts bearing the LAPTOP code surged across multiple chains. Bitquery statistics show that related contracts once exceeded 4,075, distributed across at least seven chains. Fake coins reported a trading volume of about $941 million within 19 hours after the real coin launched, with five fake coins having market caps exceeding that of the real coin itself. The largest fake coin on the BNB chain alone reported nearly $185 million in trading volume.

Most of these numbers cannot withstand cashing out. Some fake coins showed tens of millions of dollars in trading volume on trackers, but actual stablecoin turnover was only in the thousands. There were also addresses on the BNB chain driving about 5,500 wallets across 43 different tokens for "farming" style trades. For ordinary buyers, the risk is not only the real coin's crash but also clicking into the same-named fake contracts. After the real coin contract launched, the fake coins did not disappear, and the LAPTOP on the screen still mixed true and false.

The airdrop aspect also sparked controversy. The Callahan side later admitted that they had handed over a list of under 5,000 email addresses formed by opting in from a merchandise store to Biden's team. After the token plunged, this list, combined with the publicity of "giving candy to those at a loss," escalated criticism in the comments section. Political meme coins rely on attention for pricing, and the email list turned that attention into an accountable distribution channel.

5. Remedial Measures, Destruction, and the Unfinished Second Half

The project's remedial checklist afterward was not complex: inject 4 million tokens (about 0.4% of the supply) into the Aerodrome pool as liquidity incentives; claim that two predictions have been fulfilled and destroy 10 million tokens, equivalent to cutting the circulating supply by another 1%. One of those predictions is related to the artist Beeple mentioning the token. The team also stated that it would deepen the order books to avoid situations like "opening price at $0.05 with market makers unable to hold the line."

These actions do not change the allocation results that have already happened. Early robots and a small number of addresses took away the vast majority of profits, leaving late retail investors with the bulk of losses. The trajectory of the Trump family token falling from its peak has not been inverted by Biden's narrative rewrite; $LAPTOP even walked through the same shallow pool logic again. By the time Forbes published, the $0.30 low had already written the "symbol of redemption" into the cost for another group of trapped wallets.

The old script of political meme coins is playing out once again: narratives can instantly fill quotes, while shallow pools and bots decide who exits first. Biden hoped to use this coin to counter the "weaponization of the laptop," but the market's response was colder—symbols can go on-chain, but liquidity cannot be compensated for with slogans. The $5,000 opening arrangement was enough to turn a nationwide focus into a short-term market only friendly to the earliest sellers.