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At this point, if you’re not using personal access to political power to run billion-dollar crypto scams, you’re seriously missing out.
Previously, it was the Trump dynasty cashing in, using the family name to rake in over $1 billion off the backs of gullible crypto bros. Now, it’s former president Joe Biden’s son Hunter, whose memecoin $LAPTOP is following the tell-tale signs of a cyrpto rug pull.
If you’re not familiar with this side of the cryptoverse, here’s a quick breakdown. A memecoin is basically an extremely volatile financial vehicle designed to cash in on trending memes or other viral phenomena. Unlike other cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, memecoins lack even the thinnest pretense of real world utility. Instead, they live or die on hype alone, with the vast majority of memecoins collapsing like a house of cards as soon as a few early investors begin selling off their holdings.
This, of course, is exactly what happened with $LAPTOP. According to DeCrypt, the young Biden’s memecoin launched at 8 am on Wednesday morning, peaking at a price of $190.81 dollars just two minutes after opening to traders. Before 9 am rolled around, the value of the memecoin had plummeted to just $3.70, collapsing from a fully diluted value of $144 billion to $4.8 billion in a matter of minutes.
As the Washington Post observed, roughly 80 percent of people who bought the crypto token ended up losing money.
Biden, for his part, touted $LAPTOP as a way to reclaim his honor in the wake of the convoluted laptop controversy of 2020, where it was alleged that the younger Biden was appropriating his father’s political position in business dealings in Ukraine and China.
“The symbol they used to try to end me is now a symbol of resilience, redemption, and recovery,” Biden posted on X-formerly-Twitter before the memecoin went public. “They turned laptop into a weapon. I turned it into a token.”
It’s unclear exactly how much he made from the rugpull, or where exactly any of that money went. In his post, Biden alluded to a “mechanism” by which “20 percent of the coins will be airdropped to the community,” without elaborating on what that means.
A further portion of the tokens could be sent to a charity in a spiteful dig at Trump, as Biden cryptically explained.
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