What happened?
Hunter Biden, the son of former U.S. president Joe Biden, is preparing his own memecoin with the ticker LAPTOP. The news was first reported by The Wall Street Journal, citing sources familiar with the project, and was followed up by reports from CryptoSlate, Kryptomagazín, and Incrypted.
A memecoin is a cryptocurrency built mainly around an internet joke, a community, or a personality, without any specific technological function. Its value is driven primarily by speculation and attention, not by utility.
According to the reports, the token is set to debut on September 9 on the Base network (a second-layer blockchain network operated by Coinbase), with a total supply of 1 billion units.
Who gets the tokens?
According to the Polish outlet Incrypted, 30% of the issuance is set to go to the project's founders, who include Biden himself. Part of the tokens is then meant to be distributed among users who lost money on the TRUMP memecoin.
CryptoSlate and Kryptomagazín describe this "compensation" logic in the same way: LAPTOP is presented as a gesture toward disappointed holders of the TRUMP token. Whether and exactly how this distribution will be carried out technically is not clearly established from the available sources.
Why is there something ironic about this?
CryptoSlate points out an obvious paradox. Hunter Biden has previously criticized the political monetization of crypto, and now he himself is turning one of the most politically charged episodes of his father's 2020 campaign (the "laptop" affair) into a speculative asset.
Biden himself confirmed the launch on X. According to Incrypted, on September 7 he posted a video with clips from television reports recalling the entire laptop affair and promoted the LAPTOP ticker.
What was the market's reaction?
According to CoinDesk, part of the crypto community turned against the project even before it launched:
| Party | Reaction |
|---|---|
| Kraken | Deleted a promotional post after a wave of criticism |
| Media group listed in the distribution | Publicly distanced itself from the project |
This suggests that the mood around LAPTOP is mixed to dismissive before trading has even begun.
What do we not know yet?
- Whether the September 9 launch will go ahead as planned and in the described form.
- Exactly how the distribution of tokens among TRUMP holders who lost money will work (criteria, mechanism, timing).
- What the price and volume dynamics were after any launch. These sources do not cover that.
- Who exactly the other "founders" are besides Biden.
What to watch with this type of event
This is not a recommendation to buy or sell. With memecoins tied to a single personality or affair, several things can be verified from the data: how the supply is distributed (how much the founders hold), whether there is a token lockup, who is behind the liquidity, and how the project behaves in the first hours after launch. The reaction of exchanges and partners (as with Kraken in this case) is usually the first signal of how seriously the market takes the project's legitimacy.
This is a developing story. The facts above reflect the state of the reports as of early September.