Hunter Biden's LAPTOP Token Drops 98% After Base Launch
The memecoin on Base briefly spiked, then lost almost 98% of its value right away. Arkham had already seen heavy token distribution through GSR, Wintermute, and major exchanges before the launch.
Key Takeaways
- Hunter Biden's LAPTOP token briefly rose to $190.81 on Base, but fell to $3.70 within an hour and lost almost all of its value.
- Trading in the first hour totaled about $19 million, with an estimated market cap of $1.6 billion and an FDV around $4.8 billion.
- Before the launch, millions of LAPTOP tokens had already been distributed to GSR, Wintermute, and deposit addresses at major exchanges.
Hunter Biden's LAPTOP token on Base dropped sharply within minutes. The memecoin briefly climbed to $190.81 (€164), but fell to $3.70 (€3.19) within an hour. That meant the token lost almost all of its value right after trading began.
Fast Start, Hard Fall
An hour after trading opened, LAPTOP was trading around $4.77 (€4.11), still about 98% below the peak from those first few minutes. Based on the verifiable circulating supply of 350 million tokens, the market cap came out to about $1.6 billion (€1.4 billion). The fully diluted valuation was around $4.8 billion (€4.1 billion), while the pooled liquidity according to CoinMarketCap was about $2.5 million (€2.2 million).
Arkham reported that the FDV briefly reached about $144 billion (€124 billion) right after the opening, while the liquidity pool held only $48,000 (€41,300). In the first hour, about $19 million (€16.4 million) changed hands across 314 trading pairs. Most of that volume went through an Aerodrome Slipstream USDC pool and through Uniswap v4 on Base.
Tokens Were Already Moving Around
According to BaseScan, a multisig that Arkham links to a Laptop Token wallet received 100 million LAPTOP seven days before the launch, equal to one-tenth of the total supply. About 42.5 million of that has now been distributed. Market maker GSR received 15.5 million tokens four days before launch through an intermediary address and then kept distributing them, including in tranches of 9 million, 1.5 million, and 500,000 tokens.
Wintermute also holds about 1.8 million tokens in a hot wallet, according to Arkham. Balances also showed up at deposit addresses for Bitvavo, Kraken, KuCoin, and Bitpanda. The largest single transfer, 14.5 million tokens, went to an unlabeled address about two hours before the opening. For those larger transfers, a small test send was made first each time.
What This Says About Memecoins
The fast trading around LAPTOP fits into a broader memecoin rebound in 2026, where the sector has regained more than $8 billion (€6.9 billion) in value, according to market data. Base has become a standout platform for new launches, partly because of its link to Coinbase and its low transaction fees. For European crypto followers, this mainly shows how quickly liquidity, recognizable stories, and early distribution can dominate the first hours of a token like this.
LAPTOP refers to the laptop Hunter Biden left at a repair shop in Delaware in 2019. The project also has a burn schedule with 30 outcomes, including a comparison with TRUMP. That token is now already bigger than TRUMP in market cap and fully diluted valuation, but the project has not clearly explained how that comparison is measured exactly.
