Hunter Biden spent this past week doing two things at once. He floated a possible 2028 presidential run, and he launched his own cryptocurrency. The first sounds like a joke. The second is real, and it borrows more from Donald Trump's crypto playbook than Biden's own team has said out loud.
"I may have to" run in 2028
The presidential talk came up in an interview with John Catsimatidis, a conservative donor and radio host who is also an ally of President Trump. According to The Hill, when Catsimatidis raised the idea of endorsing him, Biden responded that he "may have to" run in 2028. It reads more like banter between the two of them than a campaign announcement. It's also a real reversal. Biden has previously waved off the idea of running by joking that if he ever did, "somebody should check and see if I relapsed," according to the Washington Examiner. Nothing about this week's comment amounts to a formal declaration, but it's a notable shift in tone from a man who used to treat the question as a punchline. When pressed on what a run would even be about, Biden framed it around two things: adherence to the rule of law and addiction. "I want the next president to commit to one thing: to adhering to the rule of law," he said, adding that "the things I care most about is the 50 million Americans that are still suffering with their addictions," according to RedState, which covered the interview.
A coin named after the laptop
The bigger news is the coin itself. $LAPTOP is set to launch September 9 on Base, Coinbase's Ethereum-based network, according to CoinDesk. The name is a direct nod to the infamous laptop at the center of years of scrutiny into Biden's business dealings, which he now appears to be turning into a punchline and a product at the same time. The token has a fixed supply of 1 billion. Thirty percent goes to the founders, Biden included, locked for six months and then released gradually through 2028. Another 30% is tied to conditional burns triggered by future events, including a Democrat winning the 2028 election, Bitcoin hitting a new all-time high, or $LAPTOP's market cap passing Trump's own TRUMP coin, according to crypto.news. If those conditions aren't met, the tokens go to charity instead of back to the founders. It's worth noting these mechanics come from project materials and people familiar with the plan, not from a live contract. As of this writing the official token had not yet deployed on-chain, so the exact final split could still shift before or shortly after launch.
The airdrop targets Trump's own coin holders
This is where the mimicry gets specific. Twenty percent of the LAPTOP supply is set aside for airdrops, split across two rounds. One of the three named recipient groups is wallets that lost money on Trump's TRUMP memecoin, roughly 988,905 of them, holding a combined $3.81 billion in losses, a figure that traces back to blockchain analytics firm Nansen and was first widely reported by CoinDesk in July. The other two groups are Biden's own Substack subscribers and a mailing list connected to Andrew Callaghan's Channel 5 documentary series, which has about 3.6 million YouTube subscribers. In effect, Biden's team is recruiting people who already got burned once, betting they're ready to try the same kind of bet again, just with the other family's name on it this time.
Channel 5 pushed back hard on being lumped into the launch. "Hunter asked if he could use our mailing list whenever he launched a new product. We provided him a simple CSV sheet from our email list to help him expand his audience," the outlet said, according to Dexerto. The statement added, "Channel 5 and I have nothing to do with Hunter Biden's crypto coin. We have not, do not, and never will advertise crypto," and said the show's own subscriber data was pulled from the list before any promotional email went out to the public.
The reaction from crypto traders has not been kind. Prominent figures in the space have called the launch an embarrassment before it even happened, and both Kraken and Pump.fun deleted promotional posts about the coin after backlash, according to Protos. Base's Jesse Pollak said his team was approached by Biden's people but chose to stay hands off given the politics involved, and Coinbase-linked trader Jordan Fish, known online as Cobie, worked to knock down rumors that Base itself was somehow launching the token. There is no official partnership between LAPTOP and the network it's trading on.
One more warning worth passing along before this publishes: at least 14 copycat tokens using the LAPTOP name appeared across four different blockchain networks within an hour of the announcement, racking up an estimated $6.9 million in trading volume on fake contracts, according to CCN. None of those are the real thing. Anyone actually curious enough to look should confirm the official Base contract address before touching anything trading under the ticker.