Hunter Bidens’s LAPTOP Memecoin Hit $317, Then Crashed 98% on 1% Liquidity

A forensic review by Groom Lake, an intelligence consultancy, has found that a market maker hired for the $LAPTOP memecoin launch deployed only $5,200 of a $500,000 pre-launch budget.

What the Groom Lake Report Found

The Groom Lake report reviewed on-chain data from the Sept. 9 opening. It found that the wallet tied to “Market Maker 1” received $500,000 before launch but seeded the main pool with only about $5,200, roughly 1% of the budget.

That pool held fewer than 30,000 $LAPTOP tokens, or about 0.003% of the 1 billion total supply. Pool depth was so thin that a $6 buy could move the quoted price by roughly 5%.

Hunter Biden published the findings on X on Oct. 7, nearly a month after the Sept. 9 LAPTOP launch on the Base blockchain collapsed.

The $LAPTOP token, positioned partly as a response to political memecoins, saw its price spike from roughly $0.05 to about $317 in under two minutes, before crashing more than 98% in the same hour.

The exit came fast. Eighty-four seconds after the price peaked, Market Maker 1 withdrew its funds while selling pressure was still building.

Cash available to sellers near the live price dropped from $16,157 to zero in that window. This followed early rug-pull concerns over the 30% founder allocation that surfaced before trading opened.

Combined, the two market makers extracted an estimated $2.8 million.

Market Maker 1’s positions netted roughly $686,000, part of which was owed to a lender, while a second unnamed firm took in about $2.18 million more than it spent. Groom Lake said it found no comparable case in 668 other token launches it reviewed.

Biden Demands Buyback and Burn

Hunter Biden responded to the report by calling out the market maker directly. “The firm that screwed up the launch should buy it all back and burn it,” he wrote on X.

He also said the failure was his personal responsibility. To support his claim of no insider dump, Biden shared a Basescan wallet address showing all 300 million founder tokens still unmoved as of Oct. 7.

The Groom Lake report also confirmed that $LAPTOP was designed with a six-month founder lock followed by a two-year vesting schedule.

Biden said unclaimed airdrop tokens will be burned, and that 5% of the supply was committed to charity.

The airdrop had been targeted partly at wallets that lost money on Hunter Biden’s plan to launch LAPTOP on Base, as a direct contrast to Trump-linked tokens.

That comparison carries weight. Public Citizen estimated that investors in the Official TRUMP memecoin, still down sharply from its peak, lost roughly $3.2 billion.

Following LAPTOP’s plunge of more than 90% from its peak FDV, Polymarket odds on whether LAPTOP would hold a $100 million FDV reached 96% against, a sign that market confidence collapsed almost immediately after launch.

Whether the market maker actually executes a buyback and burn on-chain remains the only verifiable next step for $LAPTOP holders watching the Base pool.