Hunter Biden's LAPTOP memecoin launched on Base on Wednesday and immediately collapsed. The token peaked just 120 seconds after launch at $190.81, then fell 90% within 30 minutes. By the one-hour mark it traded near $4.77, and by afternoon it sat around $1.80—roughly 99% below its high.
The airdrop was designed to compensate wallets that were underwater on Trump's meme coin, but it quickly created a fresh set of losers. One wallet pulled $249,800 off Binance before launch, bought 9,124 tokens at roughly $27, and sold most of the position minutes later near $129 for about $1.18 million, banking a $930,000 gain on a five-minute hold. Hunter Biden's Substack subscribers received airdrops worth more than $400,000 at peak, and some cashed out. Others were less fortunate: one wallet spent about $200,000 on 919 tokens near $218, a position worth under $3,000 an hour later—a 98.5% loss.
Broader crypto markets were also under pressure. Bitcoin traded around $77,770, down 1.1%, while Ether fell 1% to $2,460 and Solana dropped 3% to $101. Recent alt leaders VVV, LIT and PUMP retraced 8-10%. Bitcoin ETFs saw $120 million in net outflows and Ether ETFs saw $35 million in outflows. Meme leaders were deep in the red, with DOGE down 6%, SHIB down 5%, PEPE down 7% and TRUMP down 10%.
In other industry news, Consensys announced it is splitting into two companies—one focused on MetaMask and the other retaining Linea and institutional infrastructure. Nasdaq invested $100 million into Kraken parent Payward at a $21 billion valuation. Pump.fun introduced custom pairs, and Stonkfun posted its fourth straight day of more than $1 million in revenue.
Elsewhere, Trezor warned that hackers breached its third-party email provider and sent a fake critical security alert, Block applied to the OCC for a national trust charter to custody Bitcoin, and the Secret Service froze $52.8 million in USDT tied to a Telegram scam marketplace.
