Key Takeaways
- Hunter Biden blamed two market makers for LAPTOP’s 99% launch-day collapse.
- Groom Lake estimated market makers gained more than $2.8 million from LAPTOP trading.
- Dethective flagged 50 million-plus LAPTOP tokens sent to exchanges from other wallets.
Hunter Biden Blames Market Makers, But an Onchain Investigator Isn’t Buying Everything
Hunter Biden’s LAPTOP meme coin price went from a nickel to roughly $317 in less than two minutes, an astonishing 600,000% jump that quickly turned into a financial bloodbath. Now, nearly a month after the Sept. 9 launch, the former President Joe Biden’s son is taking the wraps off an independent forensic investigation that places much of the blame on two market makers.
There’s just one problem: an onchain investigator who checked the numbers says Biden’s account is largely accurate, but the investigation leaves some inconvenient questions unanswered.
Biden Comes Out Swinging Over LAPTOP Disaster
“A month ago we launched LAPTOP,” Biden wrote on X, acknowledging the token’s disastrous debut. “Within minutes, we had a chart that looked like every celebrity rug ever. Completely broken.”
Biden said the meme coin project was intended to mock President Donald Trump’s cryptocurrency while potentially supporting charitable causes. Instead, the launch became a textbook example of what happens when a token trades with practically no liquidity.
“First, did the team cash out? Absolutely f***ing not,” Biden declared. “All founder coins sit in one wallet and haven’t moved since launch.” The forensic review, conducted by crypto intelligence firm Groom Lake, examined launch-day transactions and identified serious problems with the token’s initial trading arrangements. Biden explained:
“Market Maker 1 had $500,000 to launch with. It put about $5,200 into the pool, 1% of its cash.”
That left fewer than 30,000 tokens available for trading, representing just 0.003% of LAPTOP’s billion-token supply, Biden claims. The team attempted to bolster the market by burning 1% of the total LAPTOP supply, but the burn move did not help.
A $6 Purchase Could Move the Market Like a $7,400 Sale
The liquidity imbalance was so extreme that a $6 purchase could move the token’s price as much as a $7,400 sale. Groom Lake reportedly compared the launch against 668 others and found nothing comparable. “Put simply: it was over 1,000x easier to push the price up than to get out,” Biden argued.
The trouble deepened when the first market maker allegedly withdrew liquidity just 84 seconds after the price peaked, leaving traders scrambling for an exit.
“The biggest winners? The market makers,” Biden asserted. His accounting estimated that the first market maker’s decentralized exchange (DEX) positions finished approximately $686,000 ahead, while trading associated with the second generated more than $2.1 million.
“I think the market maker who screwed up the launch should buy it all back and burn it,” Biden insisted.
Onchain Sleuth Finds More Wallets and Millions of Tokens
But the investigation took another turn when the pseudonymous onchain researcher known as Dethective independently examined the findings. “The claims are actually correct,” the investigator wrote, confirming several central elements of Biden’s account. However, Dethective identified additional wallets that the published explanation hadn’t adequately addressed.
“But they show 1 of 7 wallets run by the same 3 signers,” the researcher explained.
According to Dethective, three additional wallets transferred more than 50 million LAPTOP tokens to Kucoin, Gate, and Kraken during the two weeks preceding the report. Another 10 million tokens reportedly reached Gate on Oct. 2, the researcher noted. Those transfers do not establish that the project team sold the tokens or collected proceeds. Nevertheless, they complicate Biden’s assertion that the founder wallet’s inactivity settles the matter.
“So is Hunter right? In part,” Dethective concluded. The investigator argued that the market makers profited from team-provided supply while suggesting other team-linked wallets might also have generated proceeds.
Biden Vows to Stay as LAPTOP Trades Near 7 Cents
As of Thursday afternoon, the crypto asset LAPTOP traded around $0.075 per coin, approximately 99.96% below its reported launch-day peak and down roughly 20% over the last 24 hours alone. Biden maintains that his founder tokens remain locked for six months before vesting over two years.
“I’m not walking away,” he insisted on X.
Biden also announced plans for next week to burn most unclaimed tokens from the project’s initial airdrop. Yet Dethective raised another uncomfortable possibility. The publicity surrounding the forensic investigation itself had apparently helped push LAPTOP’s price higher—albeit only briefly—potentially benefiting the very market makers Biden was criticizing.
For traders still nursing losses, the distinction between a botched launch and a deliberate cash grab is hardly academic. The forensic report offers an explanation for the collapse, but the additional wallet activity leaves a substantial piece of the puzzle unresolved. Still, the author, artist, recovering addict, and son of the 46th U.S. President wants people to believe his market maker story.
