Hunter Biden, son of former President Joe Biden, will launch a memecoin called LAPTOP on Coinbase-backed Base on Wednesday, and 20% of the supply is set aside for holders of President Donald Trump’s own coin, the Wall Street Journal reported. Biden confirmed the ticker, $LAPTOP, in a post on X on Monday.
The token has a fixed supply of one billion. Founders, including Biden, hold 30%, locked for six months with full vesting over two years. Another 20% goes out in two batches to Substack subscribers, a mailing list run by video journalist Andrew Callaghan, and wallets that lost money on Official Trump.
Official Trump has lost about 97% of its value since its January 2025 peak. Trump’s crypto ventures still paid. A June disclosure put his family’s crypto income above $1.2 billion, including $635 million in royalties from the memecoin alone. The airdrop goes after the constituency those products created.
How the supply breaks down
The burn mechanism is the unusual part.
| Allocation | Share | Conditions |
|---|---|---|
| Founders, including Biden | 30% | Locked six months, full vest in two years |
| Airdrops | 20% | Two batches: TRUMP losers, Substack subscribers, mailing list |
| Conditional burn | Up to 30% | Thirty listed events resolving in the project’s favor |
If every listed event resolves in the project’s favor, founders would burn 300 million tokens. The list includes a Democrat winning the presidency in 2028, bitcoin reaching a new all-time high and LAPTOP’s fully diluted value overtaking TRUMP’s. Token supply tied to verifiable outcomes is closer to a prediction market than to a standard memecoin launch. Bitcoin trades near $79,000, roughly $47,000 below its October 2025 record of $126,198, so one condition already sits within reach.
The Wall Street Journal first reported the plan on Monday, describing a token built to needle Trump. Biden has spent the year more visible in politics and crypto alike, giving interviews, posting on X and pushing back on accounts tied to his family. LAPTOP is his first on-chain product.
Base, the layer-2 network incubated by Coinbase, will host the trading. The chain has become a common home for memecoin launches because token creation is cheap and liquidity pools form in minutes. Coinbase has not said whether LAPTOP will appear on its main trading app.
A name from 2020
The branding points back at the laptop whose contents dominated coverage before the 2020 election. Biden filed two privacy lawsuits over it, and its messages and photos later became public. In a video teasing the launch, he stitched together news clips, New York Post headlines and statements from Trump.
“Corruption at a scale we’ve never seen.”
Biden used that line in August for World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s crypto business, comparing its practices to the defunct exchange FTX and citing ties to foreign governments including the UAE. In June he called decentralized digital currency and blockchain “the inevitable future.”
Rotation started before trading did
Rival memecoins slipped as attention shifted ahead of Wednesday. The selling was second-order: LAPTOP does not trade yet, so no one could dump it. Holders of smaller political and culture tokens appeared to be making room for the airdrop. Whether the flows reverse after launch, or deepen as more wallets queue up, will show within days.
The launch lands in a market busy with the Liquid Network breach fallout and a series of exchange failures. A token whose marketing plan is a 2020 scandal guarantees headlines on day one. Holding them after the airdrop settles is the harder job.
The timing lands six days before the Senate’s cloture vote on the CLARITY Act, the market structure bill that would fix the regulatory split for digital assets. Lawmakers will debate those rules while a former second son distributes a token aimed at the sitting president’s coin. Cointelegraph asked the White House for comment and received no immediate response.
Political tokens have a track record now. Trump’s coin peaked within days of its January 2025 debut, slid for months and generated large fees for insiders. Melania Trump’s MELANIA followed the same arc. LAPTOP’s conditional burn is the one structural novelty in a category otherwise defined by hype cycles and insider allocations.
Launch mechanics remain thin. Neither the Wall Street Journal report nor Biden’s post specifies which wallets qualify as TRUMP losers or when the snapshot happens. That detail decides whether the 200 million airdropped tokens reach people who actually lost money or wallets bought minutes before the list closed. Airdrop farmers will be watching both.
discussion