Hunter Biden, son of former President Joe Biden, announced Monday the debut of a new meme coin trading under the ticker $LAPTOP.
The name directly references the political firestorm that engulfed Hunter Biden beginning in 2020 over his personal laptop and its contents.
Meme coins carry no intrinsic value but frequently surge in price driven by social media attention and hype surrounding their launch.
President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump both launched their own meme coins ahead of Trump’s January 2025 return to office, with both eventually crashing after initial surges.
The $LAPTOP token will trade on Base, a blockchain ledger built by crypto exchange operator Coinbase Global (COIN).
One billion tokens have been issued in total, with founders including Biden holding 30% of that supply, subject to a six-month lockout period before any tokens can be sold.
Full vesting for founders will take two years, according to reporting from the Journal, which outlined the token’s distribution structure in detail.
Additional tokens will be distributed to crypto wallets whose owners lost money on President Trump’s meme coin, subscribers to Biden’s Substack, and people on a mailing list associated with Andrew Callaghan.
Callaghan’s company issued a statement clarifying that he has “nothing to do with” $LAPTOP, and that Biden is simply using a mailing list they provide to “expand his audience.”
The remaining 30% of tokens will be burned under specific conditions, including if Democrats win the 2028 election, if Bitcoin reaches a new all-time high, or if $LAPTOP’s market cap overtakes $TRUMP.
Biden dropped off the laptop at a Delaware computer repair shop in April 2019, and the FBI seized it five months later.
The laptop contained emails, documents, financial records, and explicit photos that became a major story in Trump-aligned media ahead of the 2020 presidential election.
Hunter Biden’s lawyers have maintained that files from the laptop were manipulated, and Biden has been increasingly vocal on social media, Substack, and podcasts about those grievances.
Biden has also made clear his enthusiasm for digital currencies, writing on X that Congress needs “to truly understand the value and potential utility of cryptocurrency” and calling “decentralized digital currency” the “inevitable future.”
