Hunter Biden has announced he is launching a new cryptocurrency satirizing the infamous laptop scandal he found himself at the center of in 2020 and President Donald Trump’s own dabblings in the sector. The son of former president Joe Biden, 56, promoted his $LAPTOP meme coin on X Monday with a brief teaser video of conservative broadcasters and Republican lawmakers feverishly referencing his notorious laptop. Leaked emails from the device, which was left in a Delaware computer shop for repair, in which Biden discussed his foreign business dealings, were published by The New York Post in October 2020, as were personal photos of his then-heavy drug use, inspiring conspiracy theories and hysteria on the right and jokes on social media.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Biden’s coin will debut on Coinbase’s blockchain network Base Wednesday, the same day that Trump is staging his midterms convention in Dallas, Texas. One billion coins will reportedly ultimately be supplied and made available within two years, with 20 percent sent to the crypto wallets of people who lost money by investing in the Trump family’s $TRUMP coin, as well as to subscribers to Biden’s Substack newsletter and those included on a mailing list compiled by his friend Andrew Callaghan. According to the Journal, Biden and his co-founders will retain a third, which they will not be allowed to sell for the first six months of its availability.
A further 20 percent will go to charity or be retained to cover costs while the founders have agreed to “burn” the remaining 30 percent in the event that a series of 30 scenarios come to pass within a given timeframe, a step that would make the coins scarcer and therefore ramp up their value. Among the conditions that would cause that to happen are a Democrat winning the 2028 presidential election, bitcoin reaching another all-time high and $LAPTOP’s fully-diluted value exceeding that of $TRUMP’s. Biden’s critique of the president’s coin comes with it trading at $2.28 as of Tuesday morning, a huge, near-97 percent slump from its peak valuation of $73.43, when its peak market cap hit $15 billion.
It is now worth closer to $600 million. Democrats on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations published a report in July, based on blockchain analysis, which found that nearly 1 million retail traders lost as much as $3.8 billion by backing the token. Trump considered crypto a “scam” as recently as June 2021 but embraced it on the campaign trail in 2024 and has since moved to install industry-friendly regulators, sign landmark stablecoin legislation and pardon key figures from within the sector, such as Binance founder Changpeng Zhao.
The president’s support for the emerging industry has provoked conflict of interest concerns – which the White House has categorically batted aside – particularly after it emerged he had earned $1.4 bn from crypto last year. For his part, Biden said on X in June he believed “decentralized digital currency and the blockchain are the inevitable future,” prompting speculation at the time he was about to join the fray. Biden joined social media earlier this year to discuss his recovery from addiction, showcase his paintings and offer wry commentary on the Trump administration, notably delivering withering assessments on the business ventures commenced by the president’s eldest sons, Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump, whom he has also challenged to a cage match.
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