Hunter Biden’s new novelty crypto token flopped Wednesday morning, losing more than 95 percent of its value in a matter of hours of its launch.
The son of former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. had criticized President Trump’s own such token, called a memecoin, as a “grift.” Critics immediately said the younger Mr. Biden’s was no different.
In a social media post Tuesday night on X, Mr. Biden presented his new coin partly as a mechanism to make charitable donations. He did not address whether and how he would personally benefit, but creators of memecoins can profit from transaction fees or if their own tokens rise in value.
Memecoins are akin to collectibles, with no intrinsic value. Their worth is driven purely by demand and speculation.
Mr. Biden’s coin, $LAPTOP, started trading at $37.26, jumped to $222.75 within minutes, then plummeted to $1.34 by midafternoon, according to CoinMarketCap, a website that monitors crypto prices.
The token’s name refers to his laptop, the source of controversy when it was discovered in a computer repair shop and its contents leaked before the 2020 election. Materials on the computer added fuel to concerns about his foreign business dealings; the Biden campaign rejected the accusations.
Mr. Biden did not immediately return a phone call seeking comment on the memecoin.
Mr. Trump took in a whopping $636 million from sales of his $TRUMP memecoin last year, according to his latest financial disclosure. That represented more than a fourth of the minimum of $2.2 billion dollars in revenue he reported.
But many purchasers of that coin lost out when it crashed in value, according to Chainalysis, a crypto analytics firm. As of the middle of last year, 58 buyers had gained a total of about $1.1 billion in profits. Some 764,000 crypto wallets, most with small holdings, lost money, the firm’s data shows.
The president’s coin, having once peaked around $74, was selling Wednesday for $2.15, slightly more than Mr. Biden’s. Melania Trump’s token, introduced along with the president’s on the eve of Inauguration Day, was selling for 11 cents, down from a high of around $14.
Critics of memecoins claim they are often no more than “pump-and-dump” schemes, where creators and early buyers hype the coin, then cash out before the value tumbles. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission can bring civil charges if it finds fraud.
Mr. Biden denounced Mr. Trump’s coin as a scam in his media post while trying to drive up interest in his own offering, flagging an article in The Wall Street Journal about its debut.
“Why would I ever want to support a memecoin? Why something that has been so misused by grifters?” he wrote. He discouraged buying his coin as an investment, saying that “you should not expect me or anyone else to make this token more valuable for you.”
Instead, Mr. Biden, who says he is sober after a history of drug addiction, promoted it as a symbol of “resilience, redemption and recovery.”
As the coin nose-dived, social media critics let loose. “You, Trump, Melania, and the others are just ripping people off who support you,” one wrote on X. “You are truly no better.”
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