Hunter Biden's LAPTOP team cites sniper bots, thin liquidity for 99% crash on launch day

The team behind Hunter Biden's newly launched LAPTOP memecoin said sniper bots and thin initial liquidity drove the memecoin's sharp first-day price swing volatility, and that the project will add pool incentives.

LAPTOP had a volatile first hour of trading on Wednesday, briefly reaching a market capitalization of around $110 billion before crashing more than 99%, according to DexScreener data. The token's price surged above $300 after the airdrop before giving back most of the gains. It was trading at around $0.84 as of 12:10 a.m. ET Thursday.

Blockchain analytics firm Bubblemaps called the LAPTOP's launch a "bloodbath," pointing out that about 80% of LAPTOP traders lost money, including two who lost $100,000 to $1 million, about 100 who lost $10,000 to $100,000, and about 700 who lost $1,000 to $10,000.

In its own Medium post published Wednesday, the LAPTOP team said that the initial pool launched the token at $0.05 and encountered "significant demand," making it a target for "predatory sniper bots."

"The market maker's initial liquidity was insufficient to meet this demand, and resulted in a sharp price spike up and down before liquidity could catch up," the project said.

The team said that it is working to ensure that available liquidity better meets trading demand, and will deploy 4 million tokens, equivalent to 0.4% of the total supply, starting at midnight UTC on Sept. 10 to "incentivize liquidity" on Aerodrome pools.

Token burns

The project also said that two events tied to the coin's prediction-based allocation have resolved "Yes," meaning 10 million tokens will be burned. The burn is expected to reduce the circulating supply by 1% within the first week of launch. 

As Biden previously detailed in an X post, 30% of the token's supply is tied to 30 predictions based on public, real-world events. When a prediction resolves "Yes," the associated tokens are burned; otherwise, they go to charity. 

The first event, tied to 5 million tokens, was resolved when digital artist Beeple referenced LAPTOP, according to the Medium post. The project did not name the second resolved prediction.

'Not going anywhere'

In a separate X post on Wednesday, Biden said that X suspended the LAPTOP foundation's official account and that the team is working to restore it. 

"I'm not going anywhere," Biden said. 

The team also clarified the token's airdrop, saying that there was no token presale or allocations to influencers. 

"Nobody bought LAPTOP before you could — and clearly if you've spent any time on crypto twitter this week, you know we didn’t pay KOLs," the team wrote in the Medium post.

The project stated that the airdrop "went to real people," with 80 million LAPTOP available to claim by Hunter Biden's Substack subscribers who joined before Sept. 6.