Hunter Biden has put down his paintbrush long enough to turn the “Laptop from Hell” scandal that dogged his father’s 2020 campaign into a cryptocurrency called $LAPTOP. Upon launching, the coin crashed 98 percent in its first hour of trading.
Coindesk reports that Biden posted “$LAPTOP September 9” on X, with a video referencing years of media coverage of the “Laptop from Hell” that he left at a Delaware repair shop. Sources cited by the Journal say the token will run on the Base blockchain, which operates under Coinbase Global.
The coin began trading above $190 in its first few minutes, but then quickly crashed down to $2.15 as of this writing, a drop of more than 98 percent.
According to Coinbase, coins were distributed to market makers and an “unknown address” ahead of today’s launch:
A multisig that Arkham tags as a Laptop Token wallet received 100 million LAPTOP — a tenth of total supply — seven days before launch and has since distributed around 42.5 million of it, BaseScan data shows.
Market maker GSR received 15.5 million tokens four days before the open, routed through an intermediary address. GSR has been distributing since, including transfers of 9 million, 1.5 million and 500,000 tokens on Wednesday. Wintermute holds around 1.8 million in a hot wallet, and balances have appeared at Bitvavo, Kraken, KuCoin and Bitpanda deposit addresses, Arkham shows.
The largest single transfer, 14.5 million tokens, went to an unlabelled address roughly two hours before trading opened. Neither Arkham or BaseScan identifies the recipient.
Biden first teased the venture in June, in an X post mocking what he cast as manufactured political distractions. “Things we’re told to fight about: Me. Laptop. Vaccines. Transgenders in sports. Pronouns,” he wrote June 5. He followed up with a reply laying out his views on digital currency: “Fiat is a sham, the banking class is corrupt, decentralized digital currency and the blockchain are the inevitable future, and the incumbents will fight it to the death.”
In July, Biden published a Substack post walking through the contents of the laptop and his history of addiction in unusually direct terms. “So. The laptop. Here is what was on it. Twenty years of my life, or a version of it,” he wrote. He described what he called the accumulation of a life lived while addicted: “Messages sent at hours that don’t belong to anyone sober. Photographs I would never have taken in daylight. A record of every way a body can fail its owner when the owner has stopped trying to help. None of it is a single dramatic moment. It is accumulation, the slow daily work of an addict doing the thing that is killing him because the alternative feels like dying faster.”
He did not dispute what the laptop contained. “All of that was on it,” he wrote, adding, “I am not denying any of it.” He called that admission significant on its own terms: “That is not a small thing to say.” Biden also compared his situation to others who have faced addiction with less public exposure than he has: “I have spent years in rooms where men and women with far less scrutiny than I have faced tore themselves apart trying to account for what they did in the middle of their disease.”
404 Media reports that YouTube broadcaster Channel 5 provided its subscriber email list to Hunter, who promptly spammed users with ads for his meme coin.
Read more at Coindesk here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.