Hunter Biden publicly crashed out over the spectacular collapse of his meme coin, ranting online about the “f–k up” that crushed four out of five investors but left one mystery trader nearly $1 million richer — a windfall the troubled former first son ignored.
Biden claimed the trouble began right after trading started Wednesday because the project’s market maker supplied far less liquidity than needed to handle the initial demand.
“There was a f–k up. The f–k-up occurred in the first 30 seconds of launching the coin, in which the market maker, for some unknown goddamn reason, only put in $5,000 of liquidity,” Biden said in the video posted on X just after midnight Friday. “And the demand was through the roof.”
In his telling, the thin pool is what sent $LAPTOP from $2.39 to an eye-popping $316 per token for 1 billion tokens — before its precipitous crash.
He incredulously noted his coin’s value was briefly “larger than the market cap of f–kin’ goddamn Blackrock,” noting the price chart “looked like Mount Everest.”
A mystery trader turned a roughly $250,000 bet into $1.18 million within minutes, earning a cool $930,000 before transaction costs, according to a blockchain analysis by Datavault AI. That’s a classic sign of a crypto “rug pull,” an expert previously told The Post.
Regular traders were left in the lurch. About 80% of those who bought $LAPTOP on launch day lost money, according to blockchain analytics firm Bubblemaps, which estimated more than 15,000 wallets ended up in the red.
Datavault AI identified one particularly brutal trade: a buyer who put roughly $200,000 into $LAPTOP near its fleeting peak was left with a position worth around $2,000 after the collapse.
Biden didn’t address either the profit or the pain his investors felt this week.
“This is my f–king token,” he said during his online tirade. “I’ve been working on this thing for six months straight.”
“I was intimately involved in every single discussion, every single step of the way in creating the tokenomics, in creating the way in which the coin would be presented,” he added.
“At the end of the day, it’s my responsibility, and there was a f–k-up.”
Biden claimed $LAPTOP has moved on, saying, “They got it under control, but not before the damage was done.”
The token’s collapse and anemic trading activity suggest otherwise, said Joni Zhuleku, co-founder and head of research at crypto investment firm Altcoin Pro.
“The price is down 99% from its all-time high. So I don’t think they do have it under control,” he told The Post on Friday.
A market maker would ordinarily provide liquidity on both sides of the trade to reduce violent price swings and produce more organic price discovery, Zhuleku added.
“The damage has been done, so there’s really not much to control,” he said.
Still, he said Biden’s explanation for the extraordinary price spike was plausible because $5,000 would represent an exceptionally thin pool of liquidity.
“The quoted price is just the price of what the last trade went through the pool,” Zhuleku said. “The last trade can be tiny and still move the price enormously if there’s only five thousand dollars in there.”
Zhuleku said that unlike bitcoin, where a $10,000 purchase would barely budge the enormous market, putting that amount into a token backed by just $5,000 in liquidity could send its quoted price soaring.
Biden vowed to stick with the project and repair the damage.
“I am in this to the end 100%, and I promise you is that we’re gonna make it right,” he said.
He did not explain in the video whether “make it right” means compensating investors who bought at the distorted early prices or describe how any such effort would work.
Instead, Biden said the project was working to increase liquidity and trading volume.
“This isn’t some bulls–t f–king celebrity token where I get on Twitter and say, ‘Oh, I didn’t know about this, and, you know, I’m really sorry,’” Biden said.
He also insisted he and his partners have “not made a single dollar,” previously saying they were in a six-month lock-in period before they could sell.
