Hunter Biden is Launching a Memecoin Called LAPTOP

gm, Defiers!

These are the biggest stories in DeFi and crypto:

• Hunter Biden confirmed a $LAPTOP memecoin launches Sept. 9
• Liquid's attacker broadcast a return of 3,400 BTC and kept 598
• Orionx halted withdrawals and began winding down in Chile
• Wintermute holds $2.4 million of PONS, Arkham says
• Router Protocol will close Sept. 30 and burn 303 million ROUTE

Hunter Biden's laptop is getting a token. He posted the ticker $LAPTOP and a Sept. 9 date at 10:55 a.m. ET Monday, over a 31-second clip of a Fox News segment about the computer, and the post cleared 250,900 views inside an hour.

It went up four minutes after The Wall Street Journal reported the launch and named him as part of the founding team. A fifth of the 1 billion supply goes to airdrops, and the list covers wallets holding losses on TRUMP, the memecoin issued in President Trump's name three days before his second inauguration, now 97% below its record. Biden's Substack subscribers and a mailing list kept by video journalist Andrew Callaghan also qualify.

The copycats did not wait for Sept. 9. The first token called LAPTOP opened on Robinhood Chain about a minute before the Journal's markets account posted the story, and 22 more pools followed over the next 53 minutes across Solana, TON and BNB Chain, covering at least 14 distinct tokens that traded $6.9 million between them. None of them is the one Biden is launching, and none is on Base.

Read more below!

TOKENS

Hunter Biden Confirms LAPTOP Memecoin Launch On Sept. 9

Total supply is 1 billion tokens. The founding team takes 30%, locked for six months after launch and released over the following two years; airdrops take 20% across two rounds; another 20% covers liquidity, exchange listings and legal costs; and up to 30% is earmarked for burns triggered by named events, including bitcoin setting a record and LAPTOP passing TRUMP's market value, according to the Journal's account of the tokenomics. Biden has published none of it himself. His X post carries no contract address, website or launch venue, and his Substack, where he has written about the laptop since July, has no post on the token. The largest copycat, a Robinhood Chain token spread across ten pools, carried a $535,206 fully diluted valuation on $5.43 million of volume over 31,878 trades in a single pool paired against SGOV, the tokenized short-dated Treasury ETF. A token trading as LAPTOP has been live on Base, the network Biden's is meant to use, since June 27.

Hunter Biden Confirms LAPTOP Memecoin Launch On Sept. 9Hunter Biden posted the ticker $LAPTOP and a Sept. 9 date to X, four minutes after the Wall Street Journal reported the Base launch. Copycat tokens traded $6.9 million within the hour.thedefiant.io

Why this matters: The airdrop pays TRUMP holders down 97%, which makes the launch a political transaction, and the ticker Biden named is already trading on the network he picked.

SECURITY

Liquid Attacker Broadcasts Return Of 3,400 BTC, Keeps 598

The address that emptied Liquid's federation wallet on Sunday broadcast a transaction on Monday paying 3,400 BTC, about $268 million, back to the federation and 598.49955894 BTC, about $47.2 million, to itself. Blockstream has said nothing publicly since Liquid's Sunday-evening statement, and every message it sent the attacker went into an OP_RETURN field, PGP-signed. It opened the channel at 19:31 UTC Sunday with 1,000 satoshis and “Please contact security@blockstream.com,” sent two encrypted messages early Monday, and at 11:46 UTC wrote “Bridge nodes are patched, safe to return the funds.” SideSwap, the federation member whose peg-out authorization key was used, said Blockstream has since established the 4,000 L-BTC in that order was created through a bug in the Elements software, and that none of its own systems were compromised. Bridge nodes remain disabled.

Why this matters: Blockstream ran a $268 million recovery through OP_RETURN messages and got most of it back, while the peg that minted the L-BTC is still down and unexplained.

CEFI

Orionx Halts Withdrawals and Winds Down After Alleged $7M Asset Transfers

Chilean exchange Orionx suspended withdrawals and opened a definitive wind-down after a forensic audit found more than $7 million of custodied assets had moved to wallets outside its control. Chile's Commission for the Financial Market said it neither supervises the closure nor holds authority to order funds returned, because Orionx is not registered with it; the CMF rejected the company's Fintech Law application on June 19 and said it had not demonstrated it held the guarantees required of authorized providers. Orionx filed a report with the Public Prosecutor's Office and a criminal complaint dated Sept. 2 against two former executives, whom La Tercera identified as Roberto Zibert and Joaquín Díaz; Cointelegraph reported both denied the allegations. The audit figures described in the complaint total about $6.98 million of accounting differences across Bitcoin, Ether, XRP and Polygon, from movements the complaint places between 2018 and 2021. Restitution sits at stage one of five.

Why this matters: Orionx operated outside the CMF's perimeter, so customers have no regulator to appeal to and must file claims with the company that lost the assets.

MARKETS

Arkham Links Wintermute to $2.4 Million PONS Position

Arkham attributed 3.43 million PONS, worth about $2.4 million, to Wintermute on Sept. 5, and said the firm appeared to be buying gradually through a time-weighted strategy while holding just over $3 million of the token. The position equals roughly 0.48% of PONS' 712.1 million circulating supply and 0.34% of the original 1 billion. Arkham asked whether Wintermute was preparing to market-make PONS onchain and stopped short of confirming a mandate. Its own holder table lists 6.46 million PONS in a Uniswap V3 pool and 5.58 million in Uniswap's PoolManager contract, each larger than the balance attributed to Wintermute. Uniswap Labs also bought PONS last week for what the project called “long-term alignment,” disclosing neither size, price nor wallet.

Why this matters: A named market maker building a position in a launchpad token puts an institutional footprint on Robinhood Chain's memecoin economy for the first time.

DEFI

Router Protocol Plans Sept. 30 Shutdown and 303 Million ROUTE Burn

Router Protocol will cease operations by Sept. 30 and permanently burn 303,333,198 ROUTE held in its treasury, according to a Sept. 4 notice that closes four years of bridge, cross-chain messaging and intent-based routing work. DefiLlama reports $9,879.92 of total value locked, 99.6% of it on Aurora, and no bridge volume over the previous 30 completed days against $515.93 million since tracking began. The notice's only explicit withdrawal instruction covers ROUTE held on centralized exchanges, whose holders must move balances before each venue's delisting deadline; bridge users and liquidity providers get no separate timetable. Three Ethereum addresses labeled Ecosystem, Foundation and Team hold 101,111,066 ROUTE each, a total that matches the planned burn exactly, though Router did not name them or set an execution date. Every protocol fee went into ROUTE buybacks and burns, leaving no treasury reserve.

Why this matters: Router blames commoditized routes and bridge fees below infrastructure cost, and its shutdown leaves liquidity providers and bridge users without a stated deadline.

Other Stories Worth Your Time

Liquid Sidechain Paused After 3,998 BTC Leaves Federation Wallet — Sunday's withdrawal left through a working SideSwap peg-out authorization key, and the recipient wrote “we are whitehats. contact us on chain” into an OP_RETURN field. The peg wallet is an 11-of-15 multisig, and updating the authorization list takes three days.

The AMC Fight Turned Into An Industry Argument Over Which Tokenized Stock Model Wins — Hayden Adams compared Robinhood's and Ondo's stock tokens to early stablecoins on Friday, hours after Dinari co-founder Gabriel Otte called the same instruments worse for end investors than common stock. Three models are competing for $2.91 billion of tokenized equities.

Oasis Vault Is Giving Away CryptoPunk 909 (Partner) — Oasis Vault bought CryptoPunk 909 and is raffling it to anyone who signs up or upgrades to a paid plan. Entry is capped at 500 participants and closes Oct. 31 at the latest, with the draw seven days after.

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