$LAPTOP on chain: five months of setup and six hours of trading

The film runs 13 minutes 55 seconds, narrated, and covers everything below in order. The numbers on screen are the numbers in this post.

Hunter Biden's $LAPTOP opened on Base at 12:02:45 UTC on 9 September 2026. I pulled every transfer of the token since it was minted, every swap on the eleven Base pools that trade it, the issuer's disclosures, the MiCA white paper, the audit and the live odds on the thirty events its supply is tied to, and put them in one SQLite file. This is what the first six hours look like when you read them from the chain instead of the press release.

Nothing below is modelled or estimated. Timestamps come from Base's two-second blocks. Dollars come from the USDC leg of each swap. The window closes at block 51,093,459, 18:31 UTC on launch day, and the scripts that produced every number are at the end so you can run them again tomorrow.

Five months before the post

The announcement went out on 7 September. Phoenix Veritas Ventures Ltd, the company that owns the token, registered in the British Virgin Islands on 26 March.

The white paper values the whole token at about $50,510 as of 31 March. On 9 September at 17:00 UTC CoinGecko had it at a $1.71 billion fully diluted value, 33,656 times the filed number, 162 days later. The project raised no money from the public. It was financed by a $1,400,000 private loan for product development, art consultancy, legal and compliance. Whatever profit the foundation makes after expenses, including from selling unlocked tokens, goes to TTM Media Group LLC, a Wyoming company the disclosures describe as "owned and controlled by the Founders". Its registered address, 1908 Thomes Ave in Cheyenne, is the address listed for Hunter Biden and for Hervé Larren, the token's other named founder, who runs the web3 advisory firm Airvey.io and sat on the ApeCoin DAO special council.

Nine wallets and three keys

The disclosures say the locked allocations, 65% of supply, are custodied by Coinbase Custody and vested through Coinbase Token Manager. On the chain, every one of the nine wallets that received the supply is a Gnosis Safe with a two-of-three threshold, and all nine list the same three signing addresses: 0xc624…7ae9, 0x394f…72a5 and 0x1d3d…af75. The Founders' 300 million, the Predictions 300 million, the Future Airdrop 100 million, Charity, Treasury, Liquidity, the day-one Airdrop wallet, the token owner and the deployer all answer to the same two-of-three.

The 80 million tokens reserved for Substack subscribers sit somewhere looser. The claims contract is a transparent upgradeable proxy owned by a single externally owned account, 0xaf40…1287. A claim needs an EIP-712 signature from a second single key, 0xf72c…d202, the project's server. The owner can pause claims, rotate the signer, upgrade the code and burn the balance, each in one transaction with no delay. The disclosures call this "a back-end-signed authorization model rather than a fixed onchain Merkle root, which concentrates trust in the signing service".

Two days of warning

The Wall Street Journal ran the story on the morning of 7 September. At 14:26 UTC the Liquidity Safe sent 50 tokens to Kraken's tagged hot wallet, a test deposit. At 14:50 the first copycat pair opened on Robinhood Chain. At 14:54 a copycat on Base appeared at the vanity address 0xb2000…3E01. At 14:55 Hunter Biden posted "$LAPTOP September 9" with a video. The first official pool, Uniswap v4 with a 5% fee, was created at 15:38, forty-three minutes after the post.

By launch day there were eighteen unofficial LAPTOP pairs across four chains with $2.39 million of liquidity between them. The official pools held $1.54 million. The fakes had traded $5.6 million by the time the real token opened. Kraken and Pump.fun both deleted their promotional posts on 8 September, and Kraken listed the pair anyway at 13:55 the next day.

The first minute

The Aerodrome pool opened with a few thousand tokens in it. The first minute took $2,078,250 across 2,509 buys for 37,574 tokens. The first five minutes took $4,564,869 across 9,402 buys.

Two wallets bought in the block after the first swap. 0xa501…282f paid $249,845 for 9,124 tokens at 12:02:47, started selling twelve seconds later through an executor contract that sold 103,932 tokens for $1.64 million on behalf of several wallets at once, and had $1,206,498 back by 12:25. No USDC arrived in that wallet in the 24 hours before the open and nothing has left it since. 0x8e3b…0746 paid $198,000 in the same block and sold for $395,078 sixty-six seconds later.

At 12:06 the market maker's Safe, 0x19cb…c41e, funded with 9,000,000 tokens from the Liquidity allocation, put 1,750,000 tokens into the pool in five tranches. By 12:08 the pool was printing $1.50. Over the rest of the day that Safe moved 79.4 million tokens into the pool and 79.0 million out across 1,277 operations of five to a hundred and sixty-eight thousand tokens each. That is a concentrated-liquidity position being rebalanced every few seconds. It appears in one swap all day. The hour's volume-weighted price was $23.07. By 13:58 the token had printed $1.36, 99.3% below the high, and it closed the window at $1.71.

Six hours of buying

15,022 wallets bought in the first hour and 320 in the sixth. DEX volume for the six hours was $33.9 million: $13.7 million on Aerodrome, $14.6 million on Uniswap v4 and $5.6 million on Uniswap v3. KuCoin, Kraken, Bitvavo and LBank added about $13 million of order-book volume that lives off chain and is outside every number here.

Take the 25,377 wallets with fewer than 100 swaps, the people rather than the bots. 22,378 of them bought. Marked at $1.71, 4,577 are in profit and 17,801 are under water, down $5,243,049 between them. The median buyer spent $49.95 and is down $30.73. The largest single loss is $205,901. Realised profit and loss across the group is minus $3,335,536.

The gains total $3,594,595 and the twenty most profitable wallets took 61% of that. The two first-block buyers took $1.15 million of it on their own. Forty-nine wallets traded a hundred times or more, which is bot and market-making activity; as a group they net plus $290,271, and one of them is the Liquidity-allocation seller below.

Holder structure at the close of the window: 19,274 addresses hold at least one token. 16,387 of them hold between one and a hundred, which at $1.71 is $1.71 to $171. Everyone under 10,000 tokens together, 19,030 wallets, holds 1.83 million tokens, 0.18% of supply. Nine addresses hold 96.3%.

Where the project's tokens went

The Liquidity allocation is the only pool the project can sell from before the founders' lock ends in March 2027. 28,000,010 of its 100 million tokens left the Safe between 3 and 9 September. 9,000,000 went to the market maker's Safe. 4,000,000 went to an Aerodrome bribe contract on the morning of launch, which pays veAERO voters to point emissions at the LAPTOP pool; at $1.71 that is $6,840,000 of tokens spent on rent for a liquidity pool. A further 100,000 followed in the afternoon.

One wallet at the end of a chain from the Liquidity Safe, 0x4b3f…01f2a, received 810,000 tokens and sold 609,255 of them across Aerodrome, Uniswap and PancakeSwap from 12:26 onward for $2,311,165. It bought nothing. Two more wallets fed from the same allocation sold 57,293 and 409,274 tokens for $156,139 and $486,146. Project-side tokens that reached a DEX, excluding the market maker's own rebalancing, come to about 1.07 million, roughly $3 million at the prices they sold at.

The larger movement went to an exchange. Eight minutes before the open the Treasury Safe started sending 30,000,336 tokens to a fresh address, 0xef36…96c3, funded at 11:53 for the purpose. At 13:09 that address forwarded 5,000,000 to a relay, 0xa722…ce2b, which sent them on at 13:16 to the address BaseScan labels KuCoin 57. The same relay had moved 1,000,100 Liquidity tokens to KuCoin at 13:06, and two smaller wallets added 500,000 more.

KuCoin 57 received 6,557,481 LAPTOP in total, 6,300,200 of it from the project side, about $10.8 million at $1.71. KuCoin's first one-minute candle at 13:30 opened at $0.50, printed a high of $5.21 and closed at $1.53. What happened to the tokens once they were inside the exchange is not visible on the chain. The other 25,000,336 Treasury tokens were still sitting in the fresh wallet at the close of the window.

Most of the sellers' dollars stayed on the chain too. USDC leaving the top 150 selling wallets after the open came to $922,600 across 4,461 transfers, and the destinations are other pools and routers on Base. They rotated into the next coin.

What a subscription was worth

The disclosures reserve 100 million tokens for a day-one airdrop: 80 million for people who subscribed to the "Where's Hunter" Substack before 6 September, weighted by tier, and 20 million "at the discretion of participating exchanges" for people who lost money on TRUMP. Early press coverage said 20% of supply would go to TRUMP losers. The issuer's own document gives that cohort 2%.

The Airdrop Safe loaded 79,999,990 tokens into the claims contract at 05:29 on launch day. A claim works like this: you type the email you subscribed with, a code arrives, the portal shows your allocation, a Coinbase embedded wallet is created from the email and the project's server signs a request the contract will honour. Two amounts exist.

In six hours 618 wallets made 626 claims for 665,417 tokens, 0.83% of the 80 million, against a subscriber base the Substack page puts at over 100,000. The rate fell from 186 claims in the first hour to 30 in the sixth. Of the 618, 25 sold on a venue, a median of 3.1 minutes after claiming; 183 moved the tokens out of the embedded wallet; 410 have not touched them. The 79.35 million tokens still in the contract wait behind the single key above. Thirty days after the claim window opened, the corrected white paper says, whatever is unclaimed is burned, and the owner can do that with one call.

Thirty bets on Trump

Three hundred million tokens, 30% of supply, are labelled Predictions. Each of thirty real-world events has a token amount attached. If the event happens by its deadline the tokens burn; if it does not, they go to the Charity allocation. Where a Kalshi or Polymarket market exists, that market's resolution is final. Where none exists, the BVI company decides.

Markets price fourteen of the thirty events, 200 million tokens, and on today's odds 136.6 million of those are expected to burn, 68%. The other 100 million ride on events with no market, most of them whether a named person says the word LAPTOP in public: Musk, CZ, Beeple, Eric Trump, Donald Trump. Holding this token is a bet against Donald Trump with a side bet on Philadelphia sport.

One event may already have settled. Twelve and a half million tokens burn if a LAPTOP/USDT one-minute candle prints a higher high than TRUMP/USDT's, on an exchange the issuer names within seven days of listing. KuCoin's first candle at 13:30 printed $5.21. TRUMP traded at $2.19 that minute with a 24-hour high of $2.28. If KuCoin is the venue they name, 1.25% of supply was due to burn twenty-eight minutes after the pair opened. Verify that against the exchange they choose before repeating it.

Six hours on the chain

The founders' allocation unlocks in six months. The Predictions tokens sit behind a twelve-month cliff. The five allocation Safes had not moved a token by the close of the window, and the disclosures say they will be held by Coinbase Custody; when that happens the signer set on the chain will change, and it hasn't yet.

The method, and the files

Everything above comes from public endpoints with no API key. fetch_chain.py pulls every ERC-20 Transfer of the token since deployment through Blockscout's logs API for the sparse pre-launch range and through public Base RPCs in 400-block chunks after it, plus every Swap on the Aerodrome Slipstream pool, the Uniswap v3 pool and nine Uniswap v4 pool ids, filtered out of the PoolManager's logs. Uniswap v4 encodes swap amounts as int128 from the user's perspective, so refetch_v4.py decodes them as signed words and flips the sign to match v3. refresh_chain.py extends the database to the chain head. analyze1.py through analyze3.py produce the holders, the venue attribution, the hourly tables, the first minute, the per-wallet profit and loss and the claim tiers. usdc_flows.py follows the sellers' USDC out. Timestamps interpolate from one fetched header because Base blocks are two seconds apart.

The database holds 335,848 transfers and 112,111 swaps in 98,142 transactions to block 51,093,459. Public RPCs reject a bare Python user agent, so send a browser one and round-robin five of them. Venue attribution walks the transfer graph, which credits a swap routed through an aggregator to the end wallet; 10,608 of 97,355 transactions are aggregator-internal and unattributed. Three of the v4 pools are ETH-quoted and use one ETH price, $2,494.

The SQLite file, the scripts, the issuer's three PDFs and the white paper are in one archive: laptop-teardown-method.zip. Run refresh_chain.py and then the analyze scripts and every number in this post updates to now. The window here is six hours old and the claim count, the Treasury wallet and the burn events will all have moved by the time you read this.