💻 $LAPTOP Flop Shows Market's Moved on From Celeb Memecoins
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On Monday, the Wall Street Journal broke the news of Hunter Biden’s plan to launch the $LAPTOP token on Base. Two days later, the token was live on Coinbase’s L2 blockchain. The former president’s son marketed it as “a memecoin built around resilience, redemption, and recovery.” He airdropped tokens to his Substack subscribers and has said he plans to airdrop additional supply to people that lost money on the TRUMP memecoin launched in 2025. 30% of the $LAPTOP supply is dependent on the outcomes of real-world events on prediction markets Polymarket and Kalshi. When these predictions come true, tokens allocated to respective markets will be burned from the supply. When they don’t, they will be donated to charity (although the specific charity has not yet been named).
The token opened on Wednesday morning. Price action was pretty much exactly as expected with celebrity token launches. The token quickly shot above $200 per token and crashed below $1.
The team blamed sniper bots and thin liquidity. Hunter Biden’s update on X included a euphemism worthy of the BBC’s “Yes, Minister”: “The reality is that available liquidity could not sustain the strong level of interest at launch.”
Kraken and Pump.fun both posted promotions for the token Monday and quickly deleted them once they saw how negative the replies were. Unliked some other celebrity launches, this one seemed to be widely hated across the crypto community.
Cobie, who runs the Base app for Coinbase, spent the pre-launch window distancing the platform from Biden’s token, and clarifying that anyone can deploy on Base without Coinbase’s approval. He was explicit about there being no partnership between Coinbase and LAPTOP.
Jesse Pollak, Cobie’s predecessor in the role, said Biden’s team had approached Base and that Base made a conscious decision not to help with design or promotion.
Our take
The last three U.S. Presidents now have family members with memecoins attached to them. The current commander-in-chief launched $TRUMP three days before his 2025 inauguration and $MELANIA followed immediately. This was famously an inflection point in crypto markets and marked a top for SOL (the meme tokens were launched on the Solana blockchain) near $300. Malik Obama, Barack’s half-brother, has also launched a token on Solana. Now, Hunter Biden has turned the object that defined his public life into a token on Base.
Celebrity launches long ago ran their course. As a reminder, during the last cycle, they were a recurring trend: Kanye West, Melania Trump, Donald Trump, Jason Derulo, Andrew Tate, Iggy Azalea, Lil Pump, Rich the Kid, just to name a few. In January 2025, exchanges were racing to list TRUMP. Now, almost two years later, top crypto teams were pulling their posts on LAPTOP following community backlash.
There are normally two types of buyers for these launches. On the one hand you have the “crypto-native onchain degen trenchers,” who view them as an opportunity to quickly make a buck if they can be early to the launch, but have no intention of holding them longer-term. On the other hand, some really are naïve and unsuspecting fans of the celebrity (sometimes referred to as sheep) who don’t understand the near-zero probability that the token retains any value longer-term. The end result: a lot of ‘down bad’ holders with worthless tokens and mainstream coverage painting all of crypto as a scam.
In crypto outside of major L1 coins (like Bitcoin, Ether, and Solana), there are primarily two types of tokens that can perform well. There are real projects that deliver value and generate cash flows, with the token somehow linked to the underlying value the project generates. And then there are meme tokens, which derive their value from a broader recognition of a cultural trend or moment. The problem with these celebrity tokens is that more often than not they fit into neither bucket. Even when they are launched with an underlying business (for example Iggy Azalea’s MOTHER token), you’re essentially buying a startup with very small odds of succeeding. And meme tokens are most successful when they aren’t forced, but emerge organically (think DOGE, PEPE, WIF, and other iconic tokens that ran to $1 billion+) market caps. A celebrity launching a token (or at least the ones launched so far), is neither.
Does this mean that celebrities will ever stop launching them or that they will never succeed? No. But the market has clearly matured to the point where it won't be enticed to buy a token simply because it has a big name attached to it. That’s one silver lining of this whole situation. The other is hopefully whoever follows in Hunter’s footsteps recognizes that unless they truly bring a novel attempt to the market, all they will end up doing is tarnishing their name.
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