Hunter Biden announced Monday on X that he will launch a meme coin called $LAPTOP, with the token set to trade on Base, the blockchain network built by Coinbase Global. The Wall Street Journal first reported the details of the project.
The token structure raises immediate red flags.
Of the one billion $LAPTOP tokens to be issued, 30% will be held by Biden and the founders and locked for six months, fully vesting in two years. Another 20% will be distributed in two free giveaways — one batch for traders who lost money on President Donald Trump's $TRUMP meme coin, and another for subscribers to Biden's Substack. Recipients of a mailing list run by video journalist Andrew Callaghan were also listed as eligible, though Callaghan later said he had nothing to do with the token's rollout.
The remaining supply breaks down as follows: 20% to liquidity and operations, and 30% to a deflationary 'event burn' tied to 30 real-world triggers over a specified timeframe — including whether a Democrat wins the 2028 presidential election, Bitcoin reaches a new all-time high, or $LAPTOP's valuation surpasses $TRUMP's, according to the Journal.
The market has already seen this movie.
Meme coins carry no underlying protocol or utility. Their value derives almost entirely from social media hype, viral trends and speculative sentiment — meaning prices can collapse as fast as they spike. Former New York City Mayor Eric Adams launched the NYC Token at a Times Square press conference in January. Trump and first lady Melania Trump launched their own meme coins a year earlier. According to Fortune, those tokens fell sharply in the days after their debuts and quickly drew accusations of being rug pulls — a crypto term for projects in which insiders sell large holdings abruptly, leaving retail investors with steep losses.
Kraken, one of the largest crypto exchanges, deleted a promotional post about $LAPTOP after users questioned why it was marketing another politically linked coin. Some platforms that had said they would list the token also pulled back their promotional posts as criticism mounted.
Biden teased the venture as far back as June, writing on X: 'Fiat is a sham, the banking class is corrupt, decentralized digital currency and the blockchain are the inevitable future.' In a July Substack post, he addressed the laptop's contents directly, describing it as 'twenty years of my life, or a version of it.'
The editorial read is straightforward.
A 30% insider allocation locked for only six months, burn triggers tied to partisan electoral outcomes, and a distribution mechanism designed to peel off disgruntled $TRUMP holders — this is not a financial product built on free-market merit. It is a political instrument dressed in crypto clothing, monetizing controversy at the direct expense of retail speculators who will hold the bag when the hype fades.
Free markets depend on honest price discovery and voluntary exchange. Meme coins engineered around insider allocations and social-media sentiment are the opposite of that. The market, as it did with $TRUMP and NYC Token, will deliver its verdict quickly. Retail investors deserve to know the structure before they buy in.
