Hunter Biden’s LAPTOP memecoin started trading on Base on Wednesday, climbing to a brief peak of $190.81 within the initial two minutes before plummeting as low as $3.70 less than an hour afterward.
The asset changed hands at $4.77 an hour after trading began, reflecting a 98% drop from its intraday maximum. This placed its market cap at approximately $1.6 billion based on a verified circulating supply of 350 million tokens, alongside a fully diluted valuation close to $4.8 billion. Pooled liquidity sat at $2.5 million, according to CoinMarketCap.
Blockchain analytics firm Arkham reported that right after trading commenced, the fully diluted valuation of the token hit $144 billion while its supporting liquidity pool held only $48,000. Across 314 pairs, volume reached about $19 million in the first hour, centered mostly in an Aerodrome Slipstream USDC pool handling 46.8% of activity and Uniswap v4 on Base managing the remainder.
LAPTOP takes its name from the computer belonging to Hunter Biden, the son of former President Joe Biden, which was left at a repair shop in Delaware back in 2019 and became a major talking point during the 2020 election.
Tokens moved before trading opened
A multisig wallet labeled by Arkham as the Laptop Token wallet took in 100 million LAPTOP tokens—representing 10% of the aggregate supply—seven days before launch, and has since distributed about 42.5 million of them, according to BaseScan data.
Market maker GSR acquired 15.5 million tokens four days ahead of the launch via an intermediary wallet. GSR has been distributing them since, involving transfers of 9 million, 1.5 million, and 500,000 tokens on Wednesday. Wintermute maintains roughly 1.8 million inside a hot wallet, while balances have additionally surfaced at deposit locations for Bitvavo, Kraken, KuCoin, and Bitpanda, Arkham data reveals.
The biggest single transfer of 14.5 million tokens went to an unnamed address approximately two hours prior to the launch of trading. Neither Arkham nor BaseScan has identified the destination.
Every major transfer was preceded by a test transaction consisting of 10 to a few hundred tokens. Allocations to market makers prior to a launch are standard practice, and the tokenomics of LAPTOP reserved 20% of the supply for operations and liquidity. CoinDesk reached out to GSR for comment.
The TRUMP condition
One of the 30 conditions linked to the burn schedule of LAPTOP is whether its market cap surpasses that of TRUMP. It has already done so, reaching $1.6 billion versus $615 million, and $4.8 billion compared to TRUMP’s fully diluted figure of $2.26 billion. The project has not detailed the specific measurement or timing criteria involved.
TRUMP made its debut in January 2025, reaching a peak close to $73 before trading near $2.25, which is roughly 97% down from its high. Nearly a million wallets sustained a combined $3.8 billion in losses on TRUMP, and LAPTOP has dedicated a portion of its 20% airdrop allocation to underwater wallets holding that token.
Originally published at https://www.coindesk.com/business/2026/09/09/hunter-biden-s-laptop-memecoin-debuts-at-usd1-6-billion-market-cap.
