Hunter Biden has said that thin liquidity at the launch of his $LAPTOP memecoin caused its price to rise sharply and then crash within minutes. Biden said an independent forensic review by Groom Lake found that the token had very little liquidity when trading started.
The token rose from about $0.05 to nearly $317 in less than two minutes before losing about 98% of its value in the first hour. Biden said the launch was not a rug pull and that the biggest gains identified in the review came from market makers rather than the founder allocation.
A month ago we launched $LAPTOP.
Within minutes, we had a chart that looked like every celebrity rug ever. Completely broken.
I promised you a full independent accounting. Here it is.
1/
— Hunter Biden (@HunterBiden) October 7, 2026
The $LAPTOP token was launched on September 9. Its price movement quickly attracted attention because of the huge rise followed by an equally dramatic fall. According to Biden, the token reached its peak because there was very little money available in the initial trading pool.
Biden said he hired Groom Lake to examine every trade made during the launch. The firm compared the $LAPTOP launch with 668 other token launches, according to Biden. He said the review found no other launch with a similar imbalance between buying and selling liquidity.
According to his account, a market maker had $500,000 available for the launch but put only about $5,200 into the initial liquidity pool. The pool started with fewer than 30,000 $LAPTOP tokens, which was only around 0.003% of the total supply.
Biden said this made the token extremely easy to push higher. He claimed that a purchase of about $6 could move the price by as much as a $7,400 sale at the same point. He said the token was therefore more than 1,000 times easier to push upward than to sell at the same price.
The sharp rise was followed by an equally sharp fall. Biden said that 84 seconds after the token reached its peak, Market Maker 1 withdrew funds from the trading pool while the price was already falling. The amount of cash available for sellers near the prevailing price dropped from about $16,157 to zero.
This meant that people trying to sell their tokens had to accept much lower prices to find available buyers and liquidity. Biden said this was a major reason for the sudden collapse.
He also said the two market makers identified in the review made significant gains. According to his account, Market Maker 1 ended about $686,000 ahead from its decentralised exchange positions, while trading linked to Market Maker 2 generated more than $2.1 million in net gains.
Biden has denied making money by selling the founder allocation. He said the founder tokens remain in one address and are locked for six months, after which they will vest over two years. He also said the team plans to burn most of the unclaimed tokens from the first airdrop.
Biden said he accepts responsibility for the launch but does not intend to abandon the project. He also explained that $LAPTOP was partly created as a response to President Donald Trump’s $TRUMP memecoin, which he has criticised.
The Groom Lake analysis provides a different explanation for the dramatic price movement from the usual claim of a simple rug pull. However, the underlying analysis was not included in Biden’s original post, so the findings should be understood as an account presented by Biden and the project rather than as an independently verified conclusion.
The episode again shows how dangerous very low liquidity can be in memecoin markets. A token can show an extremely high price or market capitalisation on paper, but that does not mean investors can actually sell large amounts at that price.
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