Four out of five people who bought into Hunter Biden’s new meme coin saw their investments go up in smoke during the cryptocurrency’s spectacular launch-day collapse on Wednesday — even as one mystery trader turned a roughly $250,000 bet into $1.18 million within minutes, The Post has learned.
An individual trading under a pseudonym spent about $250,000 to acquire 9,124 of Biden’s $LAPTOP tokens before unloading 8,480 of them minutes later for about $1.18 million, according a blockchain analysis by Datavault AI.
That amounted to a gain of roughly $930,000 before transaction costs.
Other traders weren’t nearly as fortunate.
One buyer who plowed roughly $200,000 into the token near its fleeting peak saw the position dwindle to around $2,000 as $LAPTOP came crashing back to earth, according to Datavault’s analysis.
“That’s the tragedy in these coins,” Datavault AI CEO Nathaniel Bradley told The Post while discussing investors who bought $LAPTOP at its eye-popping early prices.
The token briefly shot above $300 during Wednesday’s chaotic debut before plunging to just a few dollars, wiping out more than 99% of its peak price within hours.
“To come out and say that a laptop coin is worth $300 is, in my opinion, fraudulent,” Bradley said.
Bradley characterized the launch as a “classic ‘rug pull.’”
The term describes a crypto scheme in which developers or insiders extract value from a project or abandon it, leaving other holders with sharply devalued tokens.
There has been no finding that Biden or the $LAPTOP project engaged in fraud or a rug-pull scheme, and Datavault’s analysis has not established that Biden himself sold tokens during the price collapse.
Exactly how much Biden may have personally made from $LAPTOP — if anything — remains unclear.
The project’s founders, including Biden, were slated to receive 30% of its 1 billion-token supply, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Those founder tokens were set to be locked for six months and become fully available over two years, according to the Journal — meaning their theoretical value during $LAPTOP’s fleeting surge cannot be treated as money Biden actually pocketed.
Bradley said blockchain records should eventually make it possible to trace $LAPTOP transactions and determine how much money flowed to wallets associated with its principals.
“We will be able to see finitely exactly how much,” he told The Post, though he added that he had not yet completed the analysis necessary to put a dollar figure on Biden’s personal proceeds.
The 56-year-old son of former President Joe Biden launched $LAPTOP this week on Base, the blockchain developed by crypto exchange Coinbase.
“They turned laptop into a weapon. I turned it into a token,” Biden wrote on X ahead of the launch.
The token takes its name from the laptop that became a political firestorm during the 2020 presidential campaign after The Post first reported on its contents, including messages concerning Biden’s overseas business dealings and photos documenting his drug use.
The Post has sought comment from Hunter Biden.