#LAPTOP较高点暴跌99% The Fastest Scythe in History, Uprooting the Retail Investors

At 8 p.m. last night, Hunter Biden's meme coin LAPTOP went live on Base. After launch, its FDV briefly surged to nearly $300 billion, then plunged 99% within half an hour, sending its market cap down to $270 million. Its current market cap is $700 million.

Why call it the fastest scythe in history?
Because it started falling less than 20 seconds after launch and kept dropping without even a single pullback. Other coins can at least give retail investors some hope of recovering their money, but this one fell so blatantly that retail investors were buying the top at every price level. One person bought 919 LAPTOP at $218 per coin, investing about $200,000, only for the price to collapse and the value of the holdings to shrink to about $3,000, resulting in a paper loss of more than $190,000. This was a complete “massacre” of retail investors. More than 99% of people lost money; everyone who paid to buy was cut down, while everything dumped onto the market became free tokens.

Who made money in the end?
On September 8, the day before launch, one of the team's airdrop contracts transferred out 2.5 million tokens, which were then cashed out through selling wallets for about $2.34 million. Two bot wallets placed sell orders with pinpoint accuracy the instant trading opened and withdrew about $716,000.
Market maker Wintermute sold tokens from the circulating supply, earning $2.08 million. The 88 profitable wallets collectively withdrew about $5.57 million in gains, with 10 wallets profiting between $100,000 and $1 million.
Hunter himself claimed it was a “fair launch, with no insiders and no presale.” Yet every one of his Substack subscribers could claim 4,276 tokens, with each airdrop worth more than $1 million at the launch peak. These tokens were immediately dumped after being claimed by new wallets, causing the 95% drop within 15 minutes. The people eligible to claim the airdrop were all foreigners; with the launch at 8 p.m., Chinese users had not yet gone to sleep. It is hard not to suspect that this was a targeted snipe.

Why did he launch the token?
Because he owed money! Court documents revealed this.
He swore to the court that he “owned no car, had no savings, and owned nothing besides paintings,” while also owing his former law firm about $17 million. But no one else can be blamed either: open LAPTOP's disclosure documents and you will see an extremely rare admission. He stated: “The token has ‘no utility and no plans for future utility.’ There is no roadmap. No buyback mechanism. No governance function. Its value depends entirely on ‘community sentiment.’ Buyers may lose their entire principal.”
The project was launched with a $1.4 million personal loan. The company was incorporated with $1 in share capital and had no outside investors. It even bought the domain for only one year.
This was not negligence; it was by design.
The more bluntly the disclaimer is written, the wider the legal escape route. It basically says: I openly told you I was issuing air; if you chose to buy it, you cannot blame anyone else.

Hunter also chose this timing deliberately.
It came just before the Clarity Act, which contains a provision on “whether officials and their family members should be prohibited from issuing tokens for profit.” But even if that provision passes, it will not apply to Hunter! His father left office in January 2025, and Hunter still holds an amnesty order signed before his departure. With neither the conflict-of-interest restrictions on current public officials nor the need to rely solely on the “president's son” hype, this window was timed perfectly. $LAPTOP