$LAPTOP Hit a $110 Billion Market Cap for About a Minute. Then Its Team Blamed the Bots.
Twenty thousand buyers, one professional seller, and nobody paid to stand in the middle. The team's own Medium post names the two jobs that decided the first hour of $LAPTOP, and one of them wasn't staffed.
TLDR
$LAPTOP opened at five cents on Base and printed a $110 billion cap on a pool holding $48,000.
It lost 98% inside the hour. The team blamed sniper bots and a market maker without liquidity.
Both halves of that excuse are jobs. One was hired.
The first two minutes of trading are the whole story. At 5 cents, the initial pool opened on Base on Wednesday, September 9. Within two minutes the token hit $190.81, per Quartz and Yahoo Finance; other outlets recorded prints above $300. DexScreener showed a market capitalization of around $110 billion. Arkham put the fully diluted valuation at $144 billion at one point, on a liquidity pool that contained $48,000. The numbers are absurd on purpose; they describe a market with almost nothing in it.
By the end of the hour the price was $3.70, then $4.77, which on a billion-token supply still implied a $1.6 billion market cap against $2.5 million of liquidity. By midnight Eastern it was $0.84. On Thursday morning it was around 73 cents and the cap was $264 million. Across 314 trading pairs, about $19 million changed hands in the first hour, nearly half of it in one Aerodrome Slipstream USDC pool, with Uniswap v4 on Base taking most of the rest.
Then the team wrote a Medium post. The memecoin market maker jobs in this story are the ones it describes without naming, and anyone curious about that side of the industry can browse web3 jobs once they've read what a launch looks like without one.
1. The launch
$LAPTOP was announced on Monday, September 7, in a post on X compiling news clips about the laptop Hunter Biden left at a Delaware repair shop. One billion tokens. Per The Wall Street Journal, founders including Biden hold 30%, locked for six months and vesting over two years. Another 20% was set aside for two airdrop batches: wallets that lost money on the $TRUMP token, subscribers to Biden's Substack and a mailing list associated with the video journalist Andrew Callaghan, who said publicly he had no involvement.
The tokenomics included a burn schedule tied to 30 predetermined outcomes. One of them, that $LAPTOP's fully diluted valuation would surpass $TRUMP's, was met on debut day, $4.8 billion against $2.26 billion per CoinDesk. Another resolved when the artist Beeple referenced the token publicly, burning 5 million tokens. Ten million tokens, 1% of supply, were burned in the first two days.
Gate listed it in the first batch of tokens on its new Trenches venue. The official account on X was suspended. And the Aerodrome pool, the one that carried half the volume, was the only thing standing between 20,000 buyers and a five-cent starting price.
2. What happened next
Bubblemaps called it a "bloodbath." About 80% of LAPTOP traders lost money, per its analysis: two wallets lost between $100,000 and $1 million, about 100 lost between $10,000 and $100,000, and about 700 lost between $1,000 and $10,000. Nansen's data, shared with CoinDesk, recorded 46,675 buy transactions against 16,038 sells over 24 hours, from 20,085 unique buyers and 8,714 unique sellers. Most of the people who bought have not sold. One wallet Nansen examined was sitting on a roughly $199,000 loss. Another, per BeInCrypto, turned a $1.18 million profit.
That last figure is the story's other half. Someone was ready at 5 cents, and it wasn't a subscriber to the Substack.
3. The excuse, and why both halves are jobs
The team's Medium post, published Wednesday, said the initial pool launched the token at $0.05 and encountered "significant demand," which made it a target for "predatory sniper bots." The market maker, in the team's own words as reported by The Crypto Basic, lacked enough liquidity to meet demand. The fix was to send 4 million tokens, 0.4% of supply, into Aerodrome pools as liquidity incentives from midnight UTC on September 10.
Read that as a hiring document. A sniper bot is a program that detects a new pool and buys within seconds of creation, ahead of the humans. On Base, that's an MEV searcher's job, and the $1.18 million wallet is what a good one earns in two minutes. A market maker is a firm paid to hold inventory on both sides of a new token so that the first wave of buying doesn't move the price 3,800 times. The team's post says it had one and it didn't have enough. On a launch this size, "not enough liquidity" and "no market maker" produce the same chart.
The PLUMBER piece on this site put memecoin market-making roles at $120,000 to $300,000 in base pay, and described the bundlers and snipe-bot operators who sit on the other side of every retail launch. $LAPTOP is the case study that post was waiting for: both roles on one chart, in one hour, with one side up seven figures and the other side apologizing on Medium.
4. How it works inside a launch
A token launch with real money behind it has a sequence, and the CASHCAT piece covered it from the chain's side. From the team's side, it looks like this. Liquidity is seeded before the pool opens, deep enough that the first $5 million of buying moves the price by a defined amount, not by 3,800 times. A market maker is engaged, with inventory on both sides and an agreement about how wide they'll quote. The launch block is chosen with the bots in mind: private transaction relays, a fair-launch mechanism or a bonding curve that makes sniping less profitable. And someone runs comms who won't need to write a Medium post the same day.
$LAPTOP had a burn schedule with 30 outcomes, an airdrop targeting people who lost money on a rival politician's token, and a Substack. What it didn't have, on the team's own account, was enough liquidity in the pool. That's a staffing decision.
5. What people who work there say
The team is speaking, which is unusual, and it's speaking through Hunter Biden's own Medium post.
"The reality is that available liquidity could not sustain the strong level of interest at launch." Hunter Biden, Medium post, as reported by Moneywise
"Technical issues coupled with predatory 'snipers', who seek to beat liquidity providers to market, caused a spike in price, which has since stabilized to healthy levels." The same post, as reported by AOL
And the line that will follow the token around:
"This journey is far from over. We built this community for the long game, and that's exactly how we're playing it."
Set those against Bubblemaps' one-word summary, "bloodbath," and Nansen's count of 20,085 buyers, most of whom haven't sold. The team says the price stabilized to healthy levels. Nansen's data says most holders are underwater waiting to find out.
Nobody from the market maker has spoken. That's normal; market makers don't. But the team named the gap, and the gap is where the job is.
6. The market maker they needed
A memecoin market maker at launch does three things, and the PLUMBER guide describes the firms that do them: it quotes both sides so the first buyers have a counterparty other than the pool itself, it manages inventory through the spike so it can sell into demand rather than let the curve do it, and it sizes the liquidity to the audience. A launch announced on X to a political audience, airdropped to people who lost money on $TRUMP, listed on Gate Trenches on day one, is not a $48,000-pool launch. The team's post says the market maker lacked liquidity. The polite reading is that the team under-sized the engagement. The other reading is that it hired for the burn schedule and the Substack and not for the pool.
The verdict
$LAPTOP's first hour was a market with 20,000 buyers, one professional seller and no one paid to stand in the middle, and the team's own explanation confirms it. Memecoin market maker jobs exist because launches like this one need someone whose job is the pool, and the people who run sniper bots exist because so many launches don't hire them. If you want the seat that makes the chart boring, that's the market maker; if you want the seat that made $1.18 million in two minutes, that's the searcher, and both are hiring. Either way, browse web3 jobs and search "market making" and "trading systems," because the postings are real even when the tokens aren't.
FAQ
Did Hunter Biden's team rug pull $LAPTOP?
Biden denied it, and the public data doesn't show insiders selling into the spike; founders' 30% is locked for six months per The Wall Street Journal. What the data shows is a pool too shallow for the demand, sniper bots buying first and about 80% of traders losing money, per Bubblemaps. That's a liquidity failure, which is different from a rug and not much better for the people who bought.
What is a sniper bot?
A program that watches for new liquidity pools and buys within seconds of creation, ahead of human traders, so it can sell into the wave that follows. On Base, this is MEV work: the bot competes on speed and block position. One wallet made $1.18 million on $LAPTOP's launch this way.
Is $LAPTOP still trading?
Yes. It was around 73 cents on Thursday morning with a market cap near $264 million, per Moneywise, down from a brief $110 billion and up from the five-cent launch price. The team has added 4 million tokens to Aerodrome liquidity incentives from September 10.
