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Former first son Hunter Biden lashed out online after his $LAPTOP meme coin collapsed, blaming a “f–k up” that left four out of five investors with losses, while one mystery trader came away with nearly $1 million.
Biden chose the name $LAPTOP in a nod to the laptop controversy that became the subject of political controversy surrounding him and his father, former President Joe Biden. The hard drive from the laptop dropped off at a Delaware repair shop in 2019 contained thousands of emails documenting Hunter Biden’s international business dealings, as well as intimate photographs and videos revealing his cocaine and alcohol addiction, prompting scrutiny by Republican lawmakers into the father and son.
Hunter Biden has said the symbol used to target him is now a symbol of “resilience, redemption and recovery.”
Biden claimed the issue began shortly after trading started on Wednesday because the project’s market maker supplied significantly less liquidity than needed to handle the initial demand.
HUNTER BIDEN LAUNCHING A LAPTOP-THEMED CRYPTOCURRENCY
“There was a f–k up. The f–k-up occurred in the first 30 seconds of launching the coin, in which the market maker, for some unknown goddamn reason, only put in $5,000 of liquidity. And the demand was through the roof,” Biden said on Friday in a video posted on X.
The project’s thin liquidity pool helped drive the token’s quoted price from $2.39 to an eye-popping $316 before it crashed.
Biden said his coin’s value was briefly “larger than the market cap of f–kin’ goddamn BlackRock,” adding that the price chart “looked like Mount Everest.”
BlackRock’s market cap is upwards of $175 billion.
The mystery trader turned a roughly $250,000 bet into $1.18 million within just minutes, earning about $930,000 before transaction costs, according to a blockchain analysis by Datavault AI.
But other traders were less fortunate, as about 80% of traders who bought $LAPTOP on launch day lost money, according to blockchain analytics firm Bubblemaps, which estimated that more than 15,000 wallets ended up in the red.
A buyer who invested roughly $200,000 when $LAPTOP was near its brief peak was left holding tokens worth about $2,000 after the collapse, according to Datavault AI.
“This is my f–king token,” he said in the video. “I’ve been working on this thing for six months straight.”
“I was intimately involved in every single discussion, every single step of the way in creating the tokenomics, in creating the way in which the coin would be presented,” he continued. “At the end of the day, it’s my responsibility, and there was a f–k-up.”
Biden said the situation had stabilized, but acknowledged that investors had already been hurt.
“They got it under control, but not before the damage was done,” he said.
Biden said he plans to stick with the project and repair the damage, although he did not elaborate on whether this means compensating investors.
WHAT ARE MEME COINS? THE HIGH-RISK CRYPTO ASSETS EXPLAINED
“I am in this to the end 100%, and I promise you that we’re gonna make it right,” he said.
He said the project was working to increase liquidity and trading volume.
“This isn’t some bulls–t f–king celebrity token where I get on Twitter and say, ‘Oh, I didn’t know about this, and, you know, I’m really sorry,'” Biden said.
“Biden also said he and his partners had “not made a single dollar” from the project, previously disclosing that they were in a six-month lockup period that prevented them from selling their token holdings.
