Hunter Biden will launch a memecoin called LAPTOP on Wednesday, and the crypto traders it is designed to attract are telling him not to bother.
The token deploys on Base, the network Coinbase built, with a supply of one billion. Founders including Biden take 30%, locked for six months and released over more than two years. Another 20% goes out in two airdrops, and the first group in line is wallets sitting on losses from TRUMP, the memecoin Donald Trump launched days before his 2025 inauguration.
Biden's Substack subscribers and a mailing list run by video journalist Andrew Callaghan also receive tokens. The Wall Street Journal first reported the plan, and Biden confirmed it on X on Monday with the ticker and a montage of news anchors discussing the laptop he left at a Delaware repair shop in 2019.
As such, Base has spent the past day drawing a line between allowing LAPTOP to launch and actually supporting it.
Jordan Fish, better known as Cobie and the head of Coinbase’s Base app team, pushed back after traders began blaming Base for the upcoming launch. Anyone can deploy a token on Base without Coinbase approving it, he said, and there is no partnership between LAPTOP and Coinbase or Base.
Jesse Pollak, who founded Base, added that the LAPTOP team had reached out before the launch. Base made a “conscious decision” not to help with the token’s design or promotion, he said, because politics were complicated and it did not feel like Base’s place to steer the outcome.
“Base is permissionless and we welcome anyone to build on it,” he said on X.
Data said to have come from the device included emails about his overseas business dealings as well as deeply personal photos, messages and videos involving drug use and his private life, much of which controversially spilled into public view around the 2020 election.
The laptop spawned thousands of memes at the time. Years later, Biden is trying to financialize that notoriety by turning the joke into a token. But the response has been unusually direct.
"Dude, f*ck you. Still time to walk this back," the pseudonymous DeFi developer scupytrooples posted at Biden’s post of the upcoming launch. Prominent trader DonAlt called it an utter embarrassment, writing that Biden had “finally been handed a platform” and used it to launch a memecoin. The pseudonymous crypto investor Byzantine General told him “never to come back.”
The backlash was enough for businesses to dial down their social promotions. Crypto exchange Kraken deleted a post promoting the token after traders piled into its replies questioning why one of crypto’s largest exchanges was advertising another political memecoin.
Kraken has not said that it dropped plans to list LAPTOP, and the token’s website says exchange listings will be announced when trading begins.
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