Hunter Biden said on September 9 that no insider sold the LAPTOP memecoin and that the team's 30% allocation is locked, but on-chain records show a project-tagged multisig moved 42.5 million tokens to market maker GSR and an unlabeled address before trading opened on Base. The token fell more than 95% from a launch spike that implied a $144 billion FDV against a roughly $48,000 liquidity pool, leaving about 80% of 15,206 traders underwater.
A project-tagged multisig on Base distributed 42.5 million LAPTOP tokens to a market maker and an unlabeled address in the week before trading opened, transfers that sit outside the 30% founder allocation Hunter Biden described as locked when he denied selling on September 9.
"The team's allocation is locked. Nobody on our side sold, and nobody could have," Biden wrote in an X post at 20:54 UTC on September 9. "I, personally, have not made a single dollar." He attributed the first-day price collapse to sniper bots and liquidity that "could not sustain the strong level of interest at launch," and put the token's fully diluted valuation above $1 billion.
The distinction matters because the locked 300 million founder tokens and the 100 million tokens held by the project's operations multisig are separate pools. Blockchain records show that multisig received 10% of the 1 billion supply seven days before trading began and had distributed about 42.5 million of it by launch day. Roughly 15.5 million went to market maker GSR four days before the open, and GSR subsequently moved 9 million, 1.5 million and 500,000 tokens on September 9. Another 14.5 million went to an unlabeled address about two hours before trading started. X users attached a Community Note to Biden's post flagging that pre-launch market maker inventory is not the same as the founder allocation.
Arkham data shows LAPTOP opened at about 8:02 a.m. ET on September 9 and peaked roughly two minutes later near $190.81, implying an FDV close to $144 billion against a liquidity pool Arkham put at about $48,000. The token traded near $1.34 that afternoon and near $1.97 later in the day, a decline of more than 95% from the opening spike. The official Base contract remains 0xB09…6ec29, and the project's own site still describes LAPTOP as a collectible with no equity, staking or governance rights.
The losses concentrated almost entirely on one side of the trade. Wallet clustering tool Bubblemaps posted at 15:54 UTC on September 9 that 12,151 of 15,206 traders were underwater against 3,026 profitable, with 11,311 losses under $1,000 — roughly 80% of wallets down. A separate breakdown of the same dataset showed 88 wallets made about $5.57 million combined, while aggregate trader profit and loss was only slightly positive. Lookonchain flagged a $200,000 opening buy that fell to about $3,000 within the hour, and at 01:07 UTC on September 10 flagged another wallet that spent $170,000 buying 28,448.72 tokens near $5.97 after the crash and was marked down a further 87% to about $21,000.
Nansen data shared with Cointelegraph on September 10 showed one LAPTOP wallet carrying an unrealized loss of $117,800 and another with a paper loss of $12,300, against two wallets with unrealized gains of $13,100 and $1,800. None of the four addresses had sold at the time of the snapshot. Nansen recorded 46,675 buy transactions and 16,038 sells over the 24-hour window, involving 20,085 unique buyers and 8,714 unique sellers. Bubblemaps separately said 60% of top-holder wallets had no prior activity, defining "fresh" as funded within the previous 10 days, with most funded on launch day.
At 23:21 UTC on September 9, Biden wrote that X had suspended the foundation's account, that LAPTOP was trading at an FDV of about $1.7 billion, "roughly where it's been for the past 9 hours," and that he was "not going anywhere." At 01:02 UTC on September 10 he repeated that the foundation was not stepping away and pointed readers to a Medium post.
That note is the first operational update since the dump. The foundation said the initial pool was set at $0.05 per token, that demand and front-running bots overwhelmed thin market maker liquidity, and that it began sending 4 million tokens, or 0.4% of supply, into the Aerodrome pool as incentives from 00:00 UTC on September 10. It said two prediction events would settle as "YES," with 10 million tokens, or 1% of supply, scheduled to burn in the first week. Independent confirmation of the burn on-chain was not available at the time of writing.
The note restated that there was no pre-sale and no key opinion leader allocation, that the 30% founder allocation is locked for six months and then vests monthly over two years at Coinbase Custody, and that prediction event tokens are locked for 12 months. It also confirmed 80 million tokens are claimable by Substack subscribers who signed up before September 6, with unclaimed coins burned after 30 days. Disclosures reserve 2% of supply for wallets that lost money on the TRUMP memecoin and 8% for eligible "Where's Hunter" subscribers, with a further 10% allocated to future airdrops at the foundation's discretion.
Base founder Jesse Pollak said the project had contacted his team, but that Base made a "conscious decision" not to help with the token's design or promotion. Biden had criticized the Trump family's crypto ventures in an August 21 post, accusing World Liberty Financial of using political influence and centralized controls to benefit its founders — an argument traders have turned back on him now that LAPTOP carries a 30% founder allocation of its own.
The next verifiable checkpoint is the 10 million token burn, which the foundation says will complete within the first week of launch. Until that transaction appears on Base, the locked-allocation claim rests on the same disclosures that preceded a launch where 80% of traders lost money.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
