Hunter Biden is entering the memecoin realm — and he’s using it to take a swing at Donald Trump.
The son of former President Biden has announced the launch of a memecoin that he says will be used, in part, to compensate people who lost money on the $TRUMP cryptocurrency. And if that weren’t provocative enough to the current administration, he’s calling the token $LAPTOP.
Biden teased the news in a social media post on Sept. 7 and confirmed the news the next day, writing “With $TRUMP, nearly one million wallets have collectively lost ~$3.8B. With my token, 20% of the coins will be airdropped to the community, and I am even including people that lost money on the $TRUMP grift.”
“They turned laptop into a weapon. I turned it into a token.”
The memecoin risk
Memecoins rarely prove to be wise investments. The $TRUMP coin has seen its value drop from more than $45 when it was first introduced to just over $2 today. At the time of writing, the memecoin has a market cap of $594.4 million. In his first year back in office, Trump made more than $1 billion from crypto investments, including the $TRUMP coin.
Biden said he and the coin’s other founders would hold 30% of $LAPTOP, according to the Wall Street Journal. (A total of 1 billion tokens will be released.) Those coins cannot be sold for six months and do not fully vest for two years to assuage fears of a pump and dump scheme, which is so common in the memecoin world.
The 20% that will be distributed to $TRUMP investors will also be shared by subscribers to Biden’s Substack page and a mailing list curated by his friend Andrew Callaghan. Another 30% of the coins are tied to a series of outcomes. If those do not manifest, a percentage of those coins will be destroyed, boosting the value of the remaining coins in buyers’ hands.
Among the outcomes are a Democrat winning the 2028 presidential election, bitcoin hitting a new all-time high and $LAPTOP’s fully diluted valuation exceeding $TRUMP’s, the WSJ reports. The remaining 20% of the $LAPTOP tokens will go to charity and the foundation behind the token for various expenses, including legal fees.
Investors in the Trump crypto lost $3.8 billion. And on the whole, memecoins have lost more than 80% of their value in the past two years. That, however, hasn’t stopped some hopeful investors from keeping the faith.
While many memecoin and crypto founders dangle the carrot of riches in their pitch, Biden is taking a contrarian viewpoint, warning people that $LAPTOP will not fatten their bank account.
“You should not expect me or anyone else to make this token more valuable for you,” he wrote. “$LAPTOP isn’t just about owning something, it’s about saying something. Everybody gets knocked down. How do we help each other and our country to get back up?”
Chris Morris is a veteran journalist with more than 35 years of experience at many of the internet's biggest news outlets. In addition to his activities as a writer, reporter and editor, Chris is also a frequent panel moderator and speaker at major conferences, including CES and South by Southwest.
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