Subscribe our newsletter and get notifications to stay update
Four out of five people who bought into Hunter Biden’s new meme coin saw their investments go up in smoke during the cryptocurrency’s spectacular launch-day collapse on Wednesday — even as one mystery trader turned a roughly $250,000 bet into $1.18 million within minutes, The Post has learned.An individual trading under a pseudonym spent about $250,000 to acquire 9,124 of Biden’s $LAPTOP tokens before unloading 8,480 of them minutes later for about $1.18 million, according a blockchain analysis by Datavault AI. That amounted to a gain of roughly $930,000 before transaction costs.Other traders weren’t nearly as fortunate.One buyer who plowed roughly $200,000 into the token near its fleeting peak saw the position dwindle to around $2,000 as $LAPTOP came crashing back to earth, according to Datavault’s analysis.“That’s the tragedy in these coins,” Datavault AI CEO Nathaniel Bradley told The Post while discussing investors who bought $LAPTOP at its eye-popping early prices.The token briefly shot above $300 during Wednesday’s chaotic debut before plunging to just a few dollars, wiping out more than 99% of its peak price within hours.“To come out and say that a laptop coin is worth $300 is, in my opinion, fraudulent,” Bradley said.Bradley characterized the launch as a “classic ‘rug pull.'”The term describes a crypto scheme in which developers or insiders extract value from a project or abandon it, leaving other holders with sharply devalued tokens.There has been no finding that Biden or the $LAPTOP project engaged in fraud or a rug-pull scheme, and Datavault’s analysis has not established that Biden himself sold tokens during the price collapse.Exactly how much Biden may have personally made from $LAPTOP — if anything — remains unclear.The project’s founders, including Biden, were slated to receive 30% of its 1 billion-token supply, according to the Wall Street Journal.Those founder tokens were set to be locked for six months and bec...