Hunter Biden denies profiting from memecoin after his LAPTOP crashes. The token lost more than 95% of its value in the first hour of trading on Wednesday, prompting accusations of a “rug pull” from several X users.
At the time of writing, LAPTOP traded at $0.8562, according to CoinGecko data.
Biden’s denial
“The team’s allocation is locked. Nobody on our side sold, and nobody could have,” Biden said in an X post Wednesday. “I, personally, have not made a single dollar.”
Biden blamed the price action on insufficient liquidity and “snipers,” trading bots that quickly scoop up tokens when trading opens. He did not respond to Cointelegraph’s request for comment.
The MacBook origin
The Base memecoin takes its name from a MacBook Hunter Biden reportedly left at a repair shop in 2019. Trump allies used the New York Post’s reporting on files purportedly from the device against him and his father, former US President Joe Biden, during the 2020 election.
Before launching his own memecoin, Biden slammed the Trump family’s crypto ventures. In an Aug. 21 post, Biden said World Liberty Financial used political influence and leverage to benefit its founders.
Team defends the launch
The LAPTOP team said it held no token presale and made no allocations to investors or influencers. It said the contract address, token allocations, a Hacken security audit and a white paper were published before trading began.
“There was no stealth deployment, no hidden supply, and no surprise to benefit insiders,” the team said in a Medium post.
It claimed the initial pool launched at $0.05 per token, but the market maker’s liquidity was insufficient to meet demand.
Burns and incentives
LAPTOP said it would deploy 4 million tokens, or 0.4% of the total supply, as liquidity incentives for Aerodrome pools, starting at midnight UTC on Thursday. It also announced plans to burn 10 million tokens within the first week of launch through its predictions program, equivalent to 1% of the original total supply.
Founders are allocated 300 million tokens of the 1 billion token supply, locked for six months and then vesting monthly over the following 24 months.
| Allocation | Share of supply |
|---|---|
| Founders | 30% |
| Predictions (political, cultural and crypto events) | 30% |
| Future airdrops | 10% |
| Eligible “Where’s Hunter” Substack subscribers | 8% |
| TRUMP memecoin losers | 2% |
Wallet tracking
Nansen data shared with Cointelegraph on Thursday showed one LAPTOP wallet with an unrealized loss of $117,800 and another with a paper loss of $12,300. Two other wallets showed unrealized gains of $13,100 and $1,800.
None of those four addresses had sold LAPTOP at the time of the snapshot. Nansen also recorded 46,675 buy transactions and 16,038 sell transactions over 24 hours, involving 20,085 unique buyers and 8,714 unique sellers.
Fresh holders
Blockchain analytics platform Bubblemaps said Wednesday that 60% of LAPTOP’s top-holder wallets had no prior activity. It defined “fresh” wallets as those funded within the previous 10 days and said most had been funded on launch day.
Source: cointelegraph.com
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