Hunter Biden says LAPTOP market maker should ‘buy it all back and burn it’

The Cleanup Crew in Wilmington

In a move that feels like a glitch in the simulation, Hunter Biden has officially entered the crypto discourse. He is not talking about Bitcoin or Ethereum. He is talking about LAPTOP, a memecoin that launched on the back of his own personal scandals. Specifically, he is telling the market makers who assisted in the launch to buy back the supply and burn it to the ground.

A recent commissioned report highlighted what many in the trenches already knew: the token's initial liquidity was paper-thin, and the market makers involved walked away with significant gains while the average retail investor took the hit. For the people building in this space, this is more than just a tabloid headline. It is a case study in how the plumbing of crypto markets can be used to extract value from a project before it ever gets a chance to breathe.

The Myth of the Organic Launch

When a memecoin triggers a massive rally, the narrative is usually about 'the community.' We like to pretend that thousands of individuals independently decided a picture of a broken MacBook was worth millions of dollars. The reality, as we see with the LAPTOP report, is often much more mechanical. Market makers provide the oil for the engine, but sometimes they seem to be the ones driving the car.

The report suggests that thin liquidity wasn't just a byproduct of a new launch—it was a feature. When liquidity is low, small amounts of capital can move the price disproportionately. This creates the 'green dildo' effect that retail traders FOMO into. By the time the volume arrives, the insiders and the market makers are already looking for the exit. Hunter Biden calling for a 'buyback and burn' is an acknowledgment of that extraction, even if his motivations are likely more about personal branding and legal optics than market health.

Why Builders Should Care About Liquidity Ethics

If you are building a protocol or even just launching a token to support a project, you have a choice to make about your market makers. There is a fine line between providing necessary price stability and participating in a pump-and-dump scheme. The LAPTOP situation shows what happens when that line is ignored.

For builders, the takeaway is that reputation is the only currency that doesn't depreciate in a bear market. If your token launch is orchestrated to benefit a market maker at the expense of your first 1,000 users, those users are never coming back. You aren't building a community; you're building a liquidity exit for a third party. We need to move toward models that prioritize deep initial liquidity and fair distribution, rather than the high-FDV, low-float traps that have dominated the last two years.

The Burn as a Public Relations Tool

Hunter's suggestion to 'burn it all' is a classic PR move. In the world of crypto, a token burn is seen as an act of deflationary heroism. It suggests that by destroying supply, you are increasing the value of what remains. But in this case, the burn is less about economics and more about erasure. He wants the project gone because it represents a period of his life he is trying to move past.

However, you can't burn the blockchain. The transactions are there. The wallets that profited from the thin liquidity are identified. The report commissioned on LAPTOP didn't just look at the price chart; it looked at the flow of funds. This should be a warning to market makers who think they can operate in the shadows of a meme launch. Every move is tracked. Every trade is logged. In an era of increased scrutiny, 'just being a market maker' is no longer a viable defense for facilitating predatory launches.

The Market Maker Problem

We often talk about developers as the primary actors in crypto, but market makers are the ones who actually determine whether a token is tradeable. When a market maker has too much control over the supply—as was indicated in the findings regarding LAPTOP—they effectively become the central bank of that asset. They can create price floors or ceilings at will.

The problem is that the incentives aren't aligned. A market maker wants volume and spreads. A founder supposedly wants long-term growth. When those two goals clash, the market maker usually wins because they have the technical tools to execute faster than any human founder. The LAPTOP report is a mirror held up to the industry: if we allow these types of predatory liquidity setups to continue, we shouldn't be surprised when the people being memed start calling for the fire.

Takeaway for the Founder

The lesson here is simple: watch your liquidity. If you are launching a project, investigate your market maker's history. Ask for transparency on how they handle thin order books. If the plan resembles the LAPTOP launch—where insiders benefit from artificial volatility—then you aren't building for the future. You are just another headline in the making.

Real value is built on deep liquidity and honest participation. Anything else is just waiting to be burned.

We don't need more tokens that exist solely to be extracted by market makers. We need infrastructure that makes this kind of manipulation impossible. Hunter Biden might be an unlikely advocate for crypto market reform, but his frustration with the LAPTOP situation is something every retail trader who has been 'rugged' can understand. It is time we start building better than this.

Read the original at The Block →