Hunter Biden’s meme coin $LAPTOP began trading on Coinbase’s Base network on Wednesday, 12:00 PM UTC, September 9, turning one of the most contested political artifacts of the last six years into a speculative crypto asset.
As of 12:40 PM UTC, the token was trading near $6 while hitting as high as $316.75 within minutes of its launch—as per DEXScreener data. Market data further shows token generating roughly $10 million in trading volume within the first trading hour.
Claiming opened with the listing. Eligible subscribers to Biden’s Substack were directed to [laptoptoken.com/unlock] to verify by email and connect a wallet, with a 30-day window to collect the day-one allocation. Project materials still list a second, later airdrop and a separate slice aimed at wallets that lost money on $TRUMP.
Trading opened on decentralized exchanges, including Aerodrome and Uniswap pools on Base, rather than a fixed offering price. Liquidity was thin at first and remained modest relative to those headline figures, which helps explain the swing. Volume across Base pools reached several million dollars in the opening window.
The launch fits a pattern of celebrity and political meme coins that treat notoriety as marketing. Unlike a typical fair-launch joke token, $LAPTOP published tokenomics, a claim portal, a stated audit by Hacken, and an event-based supply rule meant to remove tokens from the founding team over time. It still carries the standard meme-coin disclaimer: no equity, no utility roadmap, and the possibility that the price goes to zero.
Hype around $LAPTOP launch
Biden confirmed the project days earlier on his verified X account, posting the ticker and September 9 date after a Wall Street Journal report named him as part of the founding team.
In a follow-up post he framed the coin as a reversal of the laptop narrative that dominated coverage of his father’s presidency. “They turned laptop into a weapon. I turned it into a token,” he wrote, while warning holders not to expect him to support the price.
The token has a fixed supply of 1 billion. Project disclosures say 35%, or 350 million tokens, unlocked at the token generation event. Allocation includes 30% for founders, subject to a six-month lock and later vesting; 30% tied to a list of public predictions; 20% for airdrops split between a day-one claim and a later round; 10% for liquidity; and 5% each for a foundation treasury and charity. Prediction tokens burn if a listed event occurs and go to charity if it does not.
An extra 50 million tokens are committed to charity regardless of outcomes. Eligible day-one claimants include subscribers to Biden’s Substack and some wallets that lost money on the $TRUMP meme coin.
Copycat risk is the immediate practical issue for anyone interacting with the name. At least 14 lookalike tokens appeared across other networks within an hour of the first news report, some reporting large but often illusory volume. The project and several news outlets have repeated the same instruction: ignore the ticker and check the Base address.
As of late morning UTC on launch day, $LAPTOP was live, claimable for qualifying Substack users, and trading with the kind of volatility that usually accompanies a political meme’s first hour. Whether the prediction mechanism or the airdrop to $TRUMP losers becomes more than branding will be settled on-chain over the coming months, not in the opening print.
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