Hunter Biden has denied profiting from his LAPTOP memecoin after its launch-day price crash, adding that neither he nor his team had sold tokens.
Several X users accused the LAPTOP project of a “rug pull” after the memecoin lost more than 95% of its value in the first hour of trading on Wednesday. At the time of writing, the new token traded at $0.8562, according to CoinGecko data.
“The team’s allocation is locked. Nobody on our side sold, and nobody could have,” Biden said in an X post Wednesday. “I, personally, have not made a single dollar.”
Biden blamed the price action on insufficient liquidity and “snipers,” which are trading bots that quickly swoop up tokens when trading opens.
The Base memecoin takes its name from a MacBook Hunter Biden reportedly left at a repair shop in 2019. Trump allies used the New York Post’s reporting on files purportedly from the device against him and his father, former US President Joe Biden, during the 2020 election.
Before launching his own memecoin, Biden slammed the Trump family’s crypto ventures. In an Aug. 21 post, Biden said World Liberty Financial used political influence and leverage to benefit its founders.
Biden did not respond to Cointelegraph’s request for comment.
Related: Joe Biden’s son to launch memecoin, will send to TRUMP holders: WSJ
LAPTOP team announces liquidity incentives and token burns
The LAPTOP team defended the launch in a community update by claiming it held no token presale and made no allocations to investors or influencers. It said the contract address, token allocations, a Hacken security audit and a white paper were published before trading began.
“There was no stealth deployment, no hidden supply, and no surprise to benefit insiders,” the team said in a Medium post.
It claimed the initial pool launched at $0.05 per token, but the market maker’s liquidity was insufficient to meet demand.
LAPTOP added it would deploy 4 million tokens, or 0.4% of the total supply, as liquidity incentives for Aerodrome pools, starting at midnight UTC on Thursday. It also announced plans to burn 10 million tokens within the first week of launch through its predictions program, equivalent to 1% of the original total supply.
Related: California Senate passes bill to ban memecoin issuance by public officials
According to the project’s disclosures, founders are allocated 300 million tokens, or 30% of the 1 billion token supply. Those tokens are locked for six months and then vest monthly over the following 24 months.
Another 30% is allocated to predictions tied to political, cultural and crypto events. Tokens are burned when specified outcomes occur and allocated to charity otherwise. The disclosures say prediction-related burns affect unvested tokens.
The disclosures reserve 2% of the total supply for wallets that lost money on the TRUMP memecoin and 8% for eligible subscribers to Biden’s “Where’s Hunter” Substack newsletter. A separate 10% is allocated to future airdrops at the foundation’s discretion.
Nansen tracks wallet losses as Bubblemaps flags fresh holders
Nansen data shared with Cointelegraph on Thursday showed one LAPTOP wallet with an unrealized loss of $117,800 and another with a paper loss of $12,300.
Two other wallets showed unrealized gains of $13,100 and $1,800. None of those four addresses had sold LAPTOP at the time of the snapshot. The analysis covered five selected wallets.
Nansen also recorded 46,675 buy transactions and 16,038 sell transactions during the 24-hour period covered by its data, involving 20,085 unique buyers and 8,714 unique sellers.
Meanwhile, blockchain analytics platform Bubblemaps said Wednesday that 60% of LAPTOP’s top-holder wallets had no prior activity.
In a follow-up post, it defined “fresh” wallets as those funded within the previous 10 days and said most had been funded on launch day.
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