Morning Minute: Hunter Biden’s LAPTOP Crashes

Morning Minute is a daily newsletter written by Tyler Warner. The analysis and opinions expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Decrypt.

GM!

Today’s top news:

• Crypto majors fall 1-3% as oil, bonds continue rise; BTC at $77.8k
• Recent alt leaders VVV, LIT, PUMP retrace 8-10%
• Consensys is splitting into 2 companies, MetaMask focused on wallet and Consensys keeping Linea and EVM
• Nasdaq invests $100M into Kraken parent at $21B valuation
• Pump debuts Custom Pairs while Stonkfun posts 4th straight $1M+ day

💻 Hunter Biden’s LAPTOP Crashes

Hunter Biden’s memecoin LAPTOP launched on Base on Wednesday and peaked 120 seconds later at $190.81. Within 30 minutes it was down 90%. By the one-hour mark it traded near $4.77, and by afternoon it sat around $1.80, roughly 99% below the high. The token whose airdrop was designed to compensate wallets underwater on Trump’s meme coin spent its first day manufacturing a fresh set of them.

There were a few winners. One wallet pulled $249,800 off Binance before launch, bought 9,124 tokens at roughly $27, and sold most of the position minutes later near $129 a token for about $1.18 million. That’s a $930,000 gain on a five-minute hold. Hunter Biden substack subscribers received airdrops worth $400k+ at peak, and some of them managed to cash that out as well. Of course, there were big losers too. One wallet spent about $200,000 on 919 tokens near $218, a position worth under $3,000 an hour later—a 98.5% loss came down to seconds.

As for the broader market impact, well there really wasn’t one. Majors and alts were largely unchanged in the hours after the launch, and the onchain leaders were unaffected as well (at least until a major downturn that came later in the day, covered below).

Maybe the market reaction will spook any other celebrities or politicians’ children from launching their own coins. We can hope…

🌎 Macro Crypto and Markets

• Crypto majors are red down 1-3%; BTC -1% at $77.8k; ETH -1% at $2,460; SOL -3% at $101; HYPE -4% at $82.60; ZEC -2% at $1,220
• Top alt movers include KAS (+9%), STABLE (+4%) and RAY (+2%); recent alt leaders like VVV and LIT fell 10% in a rough day for most alts
• Oil +2% at $97; Gold -1% at $4,420
• Stock futures are mixed as oil continues its rise; DOW +0.2%, Nasdaq -0.4%
• Consensys is splitting in two, with the existing company rebranding as MetaMask under Joe Lubin and a new Consensys taking Linea and the institutional infrastructure business by year end
• Nasdaq invested $100M in Kraken parent Payward at a $21 billion valuation, per Bloomberg
• Trezor said hackers breached its third-party email provider and sent a fake “Critical Security Alert” claiming an STM32 entropy flaw, with researchers reporting BitBox users got the same thing
• Vlad Tenev said Robinhood doesn’t need AMC’s consent to issue stock tokens, describing them as debt securities backed 1:1 by shares held as collateral, carrying dividends but no voting rights
• Block applied to the OCC for a national trust charter to custody Bitcoin through Builders Bank & Trust, an uninsured, non-depository bank consolidating work now run under 50-plus state licenses
• The Secret Service froze $52.8 million in USDT across 52 wallets tied to Telegram scam marketplace Xinbi Guarantee, which has processed at least $24 billion since 2022
• DoubleZero added Kalshi’s election and politics order books to its low-latency data feed ahead of the November 3 midterms, with more than $133 million already wagered on House and Senate races

Corporate Treasuries & ETFs

Meme Coin Tracker

• Meme leaders were very red; DOGE -6%, SHIB -5%, PEPE -7%, PENGU -6%, TRUMP -10%, SPX -6%
• Robinhood chain leaders were very red as Pons fell 30%; Pons -28% to $380M; AI -10% at $200M; Cashcat -12% at $160M; MOO +70%, Orbio +110%, astro +85% and Route +80% were top movers
• Solana had a big volume day, with top movers led by Penis +50x, Baton 70x, Ember +135x and Cate +40%; Ansem -3% at $170M
• The Stonkfun ecosystem took a brief hit after Pump launched Custom Pairs but then rebounded; Stonk -12% at $170M, ZCAT -20% at $86M, BTC +70% at $7M and Nearkat +85% at $5M

💰 Token, Airdrop & Protocol Tracker

• Lighter’s Open Interest is up over 75% since its integration with Robinhood went live, now up to $1.5B
• Pump.fun introduced “Custom pairs” allowing new tokens to be paired with tokenized stocks, crypto majors and more
• Pump.fun matched Hyperliquid in daily revenue with $1.8M, with those protocols reclaiming the 3-4 spots in revenue behind Tether and Circle
• Stonkfun completed its 4th $1M+ revenue day with $1.35M

🚚 What is happening in NFTs?

• NFT leaders were mostly flat; Punks even at 30 ETH, BAYC even at 6.8 ETH, Pudgy even at 3.7 ETH
• Otherdeeds (+20%) and The 404 Machines (+12%) led top movers