A wallet withdrew nearly $250,000 in USDC from Binance ahead of the September 9 Base debut, spent $200,040 on 919 .4178 $LAPTOP tokens at roughly $217.60 each, and was left with a bag valued at about $3,000 within the first hour of trading, on-chain data flagged by blockchain tracking service Lookonchain shows.
The launch of Hunter Biden’s $LAPTOP meme coin on Base, the Ethereum Layer-2 network built by cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, produced two very different documented outcomes for launch-day buyers within the first hour of open trading.
On-chain analytics account Lookonchain, which tracks large wallet activity across public blockchains, posted the first of two Wednesday flags at 12:19 UTC on September 9 and the second at 12:47 UTC the same morning.
The $200,000 Buy That Was Marked at $3,000
In the 12:47 UTC post, Lookonchain wrote that one trader “turned $200K into just $3K” after buying into $LAPTOP at launch. According to the transaction details attached to the post, the wallet withdrew $249,974.80 in USDC, a United States dollar-pegged stablecoin, from centralized exchange Binance in advance of the launch. It then executed two USDC spends of $100,020 each against a Binance decentralized exchange (DEX) router, receiving 399.6714 and 519.7464 tokens, respectively.
Those two swaps combine to 919.4178 $LAPTOP tokens for approximately $200,040 in USDC, or about $217.60 per token before gas fees. The same stack was marked at roughly $3,000 at the time of the post, an implied drawdown of about 98.5% within the launch window on that single bag. Lookonchain rounded the same wallet to 919 tokens bought at $218.
A Separate Wallet Booked More Than $1 Million
Not every documented launch wallet printed a loss. Twenty-eight minutes earlier, at 12:19 UTC, Lookonchain reported that wallet address 0xa50..82f had spent 100 ether (ETH), worth about $249,800, to acquire 9,124.19 $LAPTOP tokens. The same address then sold 8,480 tokens for 472 ETH, worth approximately $1.18 million, while still holding 644 tokens valued at about $110,000 at the time of the post.
The realized and unrealized legs together implied a net profit above $1 million on the position within minutes of trading opening. On the tape, that wallet is a separate address from the $200,000 buyer flagged in the later Lookonchain post.
Public Price Screens Reflected the Whipsaw
At 12:42 UTC, market commentator Crypto Rover posted that $LAPTOP had “already crashed 90% from its peak, in just 30 minutes”. Aggregator screens tracked the swings in real time. The CoinMarketCap listing for “Hunter Biden’s Laptop”, tied to Base contract address 0xB09..6ec29, showed a 24-hour range on launch day running from an all-time high of $190.81 to an all-time low of $3.70, with both extremes timestamped September 9, 2026.
The same page listed a last price around $7.31 at the time of this report, a decline of about 96.16% on the day, alongside 24-hour volume of about $18.57 million, circulating supply of 350 million out of a 1 billion maximum supply, a quoted market capitalization near $2.56 billion, and a holder count of 15,820. The Basescan token page confirms the contract address and its issuance on the Base network.
Those CoinMarketCap figures are a timestamped snapshot; later prints on the same page moved toward about $3.01–$4.01, with market cap near $1.05–$1.40 billion, 24-hour volume near $23 million, and holder count above 19,000.
A separate flash, citing on-chain data provider GMGN, reported that the LAPTOP market capitalization “briefly surged to $314.9 billion after listing” before falling under $8 billion. Those launch-hour prints sit far above the circulating-supply number and reflect thin decentralized-exchange liquidity relative to the quoted fully diluted valuation, which is a common feature of low-float meme-coin openings.
What Preceded the Launch
The Base listing plan for $LAPTOP was first surfaced in a Wall Street Journal exclusive by Vicky Ge Huang, published on September 7, 2026, at 14:50 UTC. Four minutes later, at 14:55 UTC, Hunter Biden confirmed the plan with a “$LAPTOP / September 9” post on X.
On September 8 at 22:14 UTC, he published a longer follow-up statement saying 20% of supply would be reserved for community airdrops, including wallets that lost money on the Official Trump ($TRUMP) meme coin, and adding: “You should not expect me or anyone else to make this token more valuable for you.”
The gap between the announcement and the launch also produced copycat tickers across multiple chains, an industry response Hunter Biden addressed in his pre-launch statement on September 9. Automated trading platform Maestro also disabled its Auto Snipe feature for the token ahead of the open, citing volatility risk.
The project’s official website lists the same Base contract, a 1 billion maximum supply, and 35% unlocked at the token generation event (TGE). The site’s disclosure page states that the token “does not represent or confer any equity, ownership, or other economic interest” and warns that digital asset prices “can fall to zero”. Burned supply and charity donation counters both showed zero at the time of this report. Hunter Biden’s Substack note, published September 9, restated the same warnings.
Current Stance
Trading remains live on Base at the time of publishing. Public price screens continue to disagree on the last print because pool liquidity is thin relative to the quoted fully diluted figures. One documented late buyer is down from $200,000 to about $3,000 on Lookonchain’s 12:47 UTC mark. One documented early seller is up more than $1 million on Lookonchain’s 12:19 UTC mark. CoinMarketCap’s last print sits about 96% below the $190.81 high recorded the same morning.
Wallet valuations and public price figures move by the minute. Numbers cited above are as stamped on the linked posts and pages at the times shown.
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