Hunter Biden’s LAPTOP memecoin surged to an implied market capitalization of roughly $110 billion in its first hour of trading on Wednesday before collapsing by more than 99%, a move the project attributed to sniper bots and a liquidity pool too small to absorb early demand. DexScreener data showed the token briefly traded above $300 after its airdrop before falling to about $0.84 by 12:10 a.m. ET Thursday.
The episode exposed the gap between a token’s headline valuation and the cash available to trade it. An early LAPTOP pool reportedly contained about $48,000 in liquidity while the token’s fully diluted valuation — a calculation based on the latest price multiplied by total supply — briefly reached as high as $144 billion in some market trackers. In such conditions, even relatively small purchases can force the displayed price sharply higher, creating a valuation figure that cannot support meaningful selling volume.
The LAPTOP team said its initial liquidity pool launched at $0.05 and immediately attracted trading demand, including activity from automated sniper bots. Sniping bots are programs designed to buy tokens at or immediately after launch, often allowing their operators to enter ahead of ordinary users and sell into a rapid rise in price.
In its Wednesday statement, the project said the market maker’s starting liquidity was not calibrated for the level of initial demand. It linked that mismatch to the sharp upward move and subsequent collapse, and said it was working to align available liquidity with trading demand.
Most LAPTOP traders recorded losses
Blockchain analytics platform Bubblemaps said about 80% of LAPTOP traders lost money during the volatile launch. Its analysis identified two wallets with losses between $100,000 and $1 million, about 100 wallets that lost between $10,000 and $100,000, and roughly 700 that lost from $1,000 to $10,000.
The reported figures illustrate how launch-day price charts can conceal the distribution of outcomes. A token may show a dramatic peak, but only a limited number of wallets may have been able to sell near it. Traders buying after the first automated purchases often face a far higher entry price, while thin liquidity makes it difficult to exit without pushing the price down.
Claims circulating around the launch also pointed to sizable bot profits, including one program said to have made more than $335,000 and another nearly $190,000 within the first hour. The project’s own statement did not provide those figures, but its description of sniper activity is consistent with a launch in which automated trading captured much of the earliest liquidity.
The team said there was no presale and no allocation to influencers. It also said 80 million LAPTOP tokens were available for eligible Hunter Biden Substack subscribers to claim, provided they had joined before Sept. 6. The distribution mechanism was intended to place some supply with subscribers rather than concentrating access through a private token sale, though the airdrop did not prevent acute volatility once public trading began.
Team plans liquidity incentives on Aerodrome
LAPTOP’s team said it would deploy 4 million tokens, or 0.4% of the total supply, beginning at midnight UTC on Sept. 10 to incentivize liquidity in Aerodrome pools. Liquidity incentives generally reward users who deposit token pairs into decentralized trading pools, increasing the assets available for buyers and sellers.
More liquidity would not eliminate speculative trading or bot activity, but it could reduce the price impact of individual orders. The launch showed how vulnerable a pool can be when a token has a large stated supply but only a small quantity of assets backing its initial market.
The project also said two prediction-based events associated with LAPTOP had resolved “Yes,” triggering burns totaling 10 million tokens. A token burn permanently removes tokens from circulation by sending them to an inaccessible blockchain address. The team said the burns would reduce the circulating supply by 1% within the first week of trading.
Hunter Biden had previously described a structure in which 30% of LAPTOP supply is connected to 30 predictions based on public real-world events. Under that model, tokens tied to a prediction are burned when the outcome resolves “Yes” and sent to charity if it resolves otherwise. The project said one of the first resolved events involved a 5 million-token allocation connected to digital artist Beeple referencing LAPTOP. It did not identify the second prediction that led to a burn.
Account suspension adds to launch confusion
In a separate post on X, Hunter Biden said the LAPTOP foundation’s official account had been suspended and that the team was seeking to restore it. He wrote that he was “not going anywhere.”
The account issue arrived during a period when traders were already trying to assess the token’s supply, liquidity plans and price collapse through on-chain activity and third-party tracking tools. For newly launched memecoins, official communication channels can carry unusual weight because liquidity changes, token burns and distribution updates can rapidly alter the available market information.
LAPTOP’s first-day trading provides a sharp example of why fully diluted valuations during a token launch can be misleading. A price reached in a shallow pool can imply a massive market capitalization without demonstrating that buyers would sustain it across a larger volume of tokens. The planned Aerodrome incentives may deepen trading pools, but the initial collapse has already left a large share of early wallets underwater, according to Bubblemaps’ analysis.
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