On Wednesday, the team behind the LAPTOP memecoin published a nine-page account of its own launch day.¹ It comes in two parts: a note from the founding team, signed off by Hunter Biden, and a “community report” by Groom Lake, a firm the team hired to go through every recorded trade from the first 36 hours. It is, as far as I can tell, the first celebrity-token post-mortem to include a logarithmic chart.
The conclusion, in the team’s own words: “The founders never sold a single token. This was not a rug pull.” The report’s conclusion is more careful, and more interesting.
What the LAPTOP memecoin report found
LAPTOP launched on Base at 12:02:45 UTC on 9 Sep at 5 cents a token, which valued the billion-token supply at $50 million.² The main trading pool, on the exchange Aerodrome, opened with 35,662.83 USDC but only about 29,885 LAPTOP, or 0.003% of the supply. According to the report, a purchase of just 6.02 USDC was enough to push the quoted price up 5%.
You can guess the rest. The pool recorded 22,475 swaps in its first hour.³ The quote went from 5 cents to about $316.75 by 12:04:29, then ended the hour 98.27% below that peak. Screens briefly implied a valuation above $300 billion. Nobody could have sold at that price, as the report itself points out at some length.
The market makers, unnamed
The report says two firms were hired to keep trading orderly, and calls them Market Maker 1 and Market Maker 2. It assesses, with “moderate confidence”, that a Safe wallet was likely controlled by Market Maker 1. That wallet received 500,000 USDC before launch and put 5,243.96 USDC into its opening positions, about 1% of its budget.
At 12:05:53 UTC, 84 seconds after the peak, that wallet withdrew a position. The cash available to sellers before a further 5% fall dropped from about $16,158 to zero, the report says. The wallet resumed providing liquidity 16 seconds later, though not at the same level near the price.
Its positions ended about $686,000 ahead before gas, though a loan agreement reserves some of those fees for a lender. Trading linked to Market Maker 2 took in about $2.18 million more than it paid.⁴
Biden’s response on X was brief: “I think the market maker who screwed up the launch should buy it all back and burn it.”⁵
Now the caveats, which are the report’s own. “A blockchain address does not itself establish corporate ownership,” it says. High confidence in a transaction “does not automatically establish the corporate identity of its controller or the person’s intent.” Groom Lake describes the overall explanation (thin inventory, heavy trading, scattered prices and the liquidity pull) with moderate confidence.
So the report does not accuse anyone of manipulation. It describes a launch whose opening conditions made a crash very likely, and two firms that came out ahead.
Who checks the checkers
The founders’ wallet still held all 300 million of its tokens as of 2 Oct, according to the report, which gives the address so anyone can look. The team says those tokens are locked for six months and vest over two years.
That is more disclosure than most celebrity tokens offer. It is also a report commissioned by the project about its own launch, which names its own wallet in detail and the market makers not at all. Both things can be true.
Related: Last Sunday’s Ledger
Incident ledger
- Frogman wallets, 7 Oct: more than $4 million drained, by his own estimate. Frogman’s drained wallets
- FlashLoopAdapter, 2 Oct: 114 ETH taken from two Safe wallets. the FlashLoopAdapter exploit
- Bitget, still moving: no new loss, but the September haul continues its trip through THORChain.
Related: The Bitget fund trail
Losses logged this week: about $4 million plus 114 ETH. These are estimates from the victims and researchers, not reconciled figures. LAPTOP is not on the list, because a bad launch is not a hack, whatever it feels like to the buyers.
Memecoins sell the idea that anyone can get in early. The report shows how small “early” can be: 30,000 tokens and a few thousand dollars between the crowd and the price. — L.C.
¹ The PDF is dated 2 Oct; Biden and the team published it on 7 Oct.
² Fully diluted, which is a fancy way of saying “if every token were worth what the last one sold for”.
³ Swaps are trades, not people. The report says this too.
⁴ Different accounting scopes, the report notes, so please don’t add the two numbers together.
⁵ Post 9/ of his 7 Oct thread. Other posts in the thread make political points I’ve left out.
References
- LAPTOP founding team and Groom Lake, “LAPTOP Launch: What Happened”, community report, dated 2 Oct 2026. laptoptoken.com/launch-report
- Hunter Biden, X thread, 7 Oct 2026. Post 9/
- The Block, “Hunter Biden says LAPTOP market maker should ‘buy it all back and burn it'”, 7 Oct 2026. Link
- Cointelegraph, “Hunter Biden confirms LAPTOP token ‘not a rug pull'”, 7 Oct 2026. Link
- BeInCrypto, “Hunter Biden’s LAPTOP Report Says Market Makers Made Millions”, 7 Oct 2026. Link
This article is for information only and is not investment advice.