Will the Crypto Trenches Show Up for Hunter Biden’s Meme Coin?

Hunter Biden officially made his first foray into crypto today, posting the LAPTOP ticker today on X alongside a 31-second Fox News clip about the computer, just minutes after a Wall Street Journal report on the meme coin landed Monday.

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Biden’s post pulled more than 250,000 views within the hour, and has since racked up more than 1.7 million.

So, Hunter Biden has proved his crypto venture will get the attention he’s after. But will crypto traders actually show up when LAPTOP launches on Sept. 9 and buy the coin?

The crypto community’s reaction today was fast, and it was not as kind as it has been in the past towards other celebrity meme coin launches.

Replies to the news skewed toward mockery, with some criticizing Biden as a hypocrite. “You criticize [President Donald] Trump for doing a scam then do one yourself,” one user wrote. The sentiment repeats across dozens of quote-tweets.

President Donald Trump and his wife Melania both launched meme coins back in 2025, shortly after Trump won his reelection bid. Since launching, both tokens have lost more than 90% of their respective market capitalizations.

That fact is, of course, not lost on Biden. His meme coin specifically targets people who lost money on Trump’s official meme coin, which trades as TRUMP, by offering the biggest losers part of a 20% airdrop of the LAPTOP token’s total supply.

Still, much of the anger and disappointment being levied at Biden from the crypto trenches likely draws from the fact that these traders have been badly burned on these kinds of meme coins before—both from the Trump family and the many, many “celebrity meme coin” launches that preceded it.

Some of the skepticism today also focused on LAPTOP’s timing. One trader pointed out that announcing the launch two days early, with a ticker already circulating, hands bots and snipers—automated buyers programmed to strike the instant a token goes live—a head start over anyone trying to buy in normally.

Within minutes of Hunter Biden’s post today, several copycat tokens using the LAPTOP ticker popped up across other networks. No official contract address for the real token has surfaced, which by now is a familiar warning: Treat anything trading before the launch as fake.

Others framed the launch as a symptom of a bigger fight. The Ethereum second-layer network Base and rival network Solana have spent 2026 losing meme-coin volume to Robinhood Chain, the Arbitrum-based network that launched in July and has since posted daily fees higher than both older chains combined.

One trader argued the LAPTOP listing reads like Base chasing relevance rather than picking projects on merit.

A post from cryptocurrency exchange Kraken promoting a LAPTOP listing circulated widely Monday afternoon before disappearing, and screenshots of it spread faster than any explanation did.

Crypto degens praised Kraken for hearing the community, at least when it comes to the announcement.

Pump.fun, the meme coin maker app which expanded off Solana onto Base and other networks earlier this year, did promote the token on its own account, advertising 0.1% trading fees. That post is still live as of this writing.

Why traders may not trust the messenger

Some of the skepticism is about Hunter Biden’s own record, which is not short. He has written publicly about addiction, was convicted on three felony gun charges in 2024, pleaded guilty to nine tax charges the same year, and received a pardon from his father, former President Joe Biden, weeks later.

He has also testified under oath that he’s roughly $17 million in debt to his former law firm, Winston & Strawn, which sued him last year over unpaid legal bills from those same cases. His lawyer told a Washington court in April that Biden “lives abroad” and “cannot afford” to pay. Traders online treated that detail as its own answer to why a meme coin and why now.

But crypto traders needn’t search for clues to explain Hunter Biden’s motivations—he’s plainly stated them before. In an interview with former FOX News host Tucker Carlson several weeks ago, Biden told Tucker he planned on getting into crypto, and for two simple reasons: He’s interested in the technology, and he “wants to make some money,” he said.

Biden even made direct references to his legal bills during the interview, so it’s not very difficult to put two and two together. Hunter is launching a meme coin for the same reason most people in crypto spend their time on coins and tickers: to make as much money as quickly as possible.

That said, recent history suggests the question of whether crypto traders will show up for Biden’s meme coin has two different answers depending on the clock.

In the short term, the coin almost always pumps: Libra, the meme coin promoted by Argentine President Javier Milei hit a $4.5 billion valuation within hours of Milei’s post, and Hailey Welch’s Hawk Tuah coin jumped to a $491 million market cap before crashing more than 90% in no time.

Political and celebrity tokens reliably draw a first wave of buyers no matter how the internet feels about the person attached to them.

The second wave is the one that decides whether a token becomes a headline or a punchline, and it has gone badly more often than not.

When crypto wallets belonging to the developers of a meme coin control most of the supply of that same meme coin, things inevitably fall apart—just ask Hailey Welch, who has yet to fully recover from her own meme coin blunder.

As investor Mark Cuban put it to Decrypt last year, every meme coin is “a rug pull in the works”—the fun, and the risk, is guessing when.