A single anonymous trader walked away with more than a million dollars in profit within minutes of a cryptocurrency launch tied to Hunter Biden, even as the vast majority of buyers watched their money evaporate.
The digital token, branded Biden’s $LAPTOP, hit the market earlier this week under the name of the former president’s son.
Within days, the coin’s trajectory had become a case study in speculative crypto trading gone wrong for most who bought in.
Data compiled by Datavault AI and reported by the New York Post showed that four out of five purchasers of the coin lost money on their investment.
One trader defied that trend. Using a pseudonym, the individual spent $250,000 to acquire 9,124 units of the token. Minutes later, that trader offloaded 8,480 of those coins for $1.18 million.
Subtracting platform costs and tax obligations, the trader’s net gain came to approximately $930,000, according to the reporting.
The story looked very different for other buyers. Critics have labeled the coin’s collapse a “rug pull,” a term describing the rapid loss of value that follows a coordinated insider sell-off.
One investor who bought in at the coin’s peak spent $200,000. That stake had shrunk to roughly $2,000 by the time the value collapsed.
Datavault AI’s chief executive, Nathaniel Bradley, described the disparity between winners and losers in stark terms. “That’s the tragedy in these coins,” he told the New York Post.
Wednesday marked the coin’s high point, when its price shot up to $300. The climb did not last. Within hours, 99 percent of that value had vanished.
Bradley did not hold back in assessing the valuation that preceded the crash. “To come out and say that a laptop coin is worth $300 is, in my opinion, fraudulent,” he said.
He went further, applying a specific label to the entire episode.
Bradley called it a “classic rug pull,” explaining that the term applies when a coin’s creators or associates trigger a massive sell-off immediately after a price surge, collapsing the token’s value for remaining holders.
Ownership structure may complicate that narrative, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The outlet reported that Hunter Biden and the coin’s founders were allotted 30 percent of the token’s 1 billion-coin supply, but that allocation remains locked for six months and cannot currently be sold.
Biden pushed back against the rug-pull characterization directly, posting on X to dispute the narrative taking hold in headlines.
“As you may have seen, the LAPTOP memecoin saw a sharp swing in token price during its first hours of trading. The headlines are all the same. Token down 99%. Rug pull. Biden Crime Family. The list goes on. This is far from the truth. The reality is that available liquidity could not sustain the strong level of interest at launch. Technical issues coupled with predatory ‘snipers’, who seek to beat liquidity providers to market, caused a spike in price, which has since stabilized to healthy levels.”
Biden also addressed questions about his own profits from the venture.
“The team’s allocation is locked. Nobody on our side sold, and nobody could have. I, personally, have not made a single dollar,” he wrote.
The coin’s debut arrived against a backdrop of political speculation. Some observers have floated the idea of Biden entering the 2028 presidential race, a prospect he has both denied and joked about publicly.
The token’s branding traces back to a laptop Hunter Biden left at a Delaware electronics repair shop years earlier.
That device, which critics dubbed the “laptop from hell,” became a flashpoint after the New York Post reported on its contents ahead of the 2020 election.
Those contents reportedly included messages tied to Biden’s overseas business dealings and images allegedly depicting him with prostitutes, details that have continued to fuel controversy surrounding him in the years that followed.
The gap between the coin’s brief $300 peak and its near-total collapse has drawn continued scrutiny from traders and financial commentators tracking meme coin activity.
Meme coins, which typically draw value from online hype rather than any underlying product or technology, have a documented history of extreme volatility following celebrity or political endorsements.
Whether regulators or platform operators will examine the mechanics behind the coin’s launch remains an open question as the token’s value continues to be tracked in the aftermath of its turbulent debut.
