This article was compiled and organized by BlockWeeks
$LAPTOP Crashes Immediately Upon Launch: The Era of Celebrity Memecoin Is Over
This Monday, The Wall Street Journal was the first to disclose that Hunter Biden planned to issue the $LAPTOP token on Base. Two days later, the token officially launched on Coinbase's L2 chain. The former president's son packaged it as "a Memecoin built around resilience, redemption, and recovery," airdropped tokens to his Substack subscribers, and said he planned additional airdrops to those who lost money on the $TRUMP token in 2025.
30% of the $LAPTOP supply is tied to real-world event outcomes on the prediction markets Polymarket and Kalshi: when the corresponding prediction comes true, the tokens allocated to that market will be burned; if the prediction fails, they will be donated to charity (the specific organizations have not yet been announced).
The token opened on Wednesday morning, and its price action followed almost exactly the same script as previous celebrity token launches—first a rapid spike above $200, then a drop below $1. The team blamed sniper bots and insufficient liquidity. Hunter Biden's update on X used a rather British-official phrasing: "The reality is that the available liquidity could not support such intense interest at launch."
Kraken and Pump.fun both posted promotional content for the token on Monday, but quickly deleted it after seeing extremely negative reactions in the comments. Unlike some celebrity launches, this one was almost universally despised by the entire crypto community.
Cobie, who is responsible for the Coinbase Base app, distanced himself from Biden's token during the pre-launch window, clarifying that anyone can deploy a token on Base without Coinbase's approval, and explicitly stating that there is no partnership between Coinbase and $LAPTOP. His predecessor Jesse Pollak said that Biden's team had approached Base, but Base consciously decided not to participate in the design or promotion.
Now, the families of the last three U.S. presidents have all been linked to Memecoins. The current president launched $TRUMP three days before his 2025 inauguration, with $MELANIA following closely behind. This is widely recognized as a turning point for the crypto market, and also marked the peak of SOL (these Meme coins were issued on Solana) near $300. Barack Obama's half-brother Malik Obama also issued a token on Solana. And now, Hunter Biden has turned the most iconic object of his public image into a token on Base.
The playbook of celebrity token issuance has long reached its end. In the previous cycle, such launches were a recurring trend: Kanye West, Melania Trump, Donald Trump, Jason Derulo, Andrew Tate, Iggy Azalea, Lil Pump, Rich the Kid, and many others. In January 2025, exchanges raced to list $TRUMP; nearly two years later, leading crypto teams are pulling down promotions for $LAPTOP after community backlash.
There are usually two types of buyers for such launches: one is the "on-chain degen," who sees it as an opportunity to front-run early and make a quick profit, but has no intention of holding long term; the other is the genuinely naive, unsuspecting celebrity fan, who does not understand that the probability of the token retaining value long term is near zero. The end result is a large number of "deeply trapped" holders left with worthless tokens, while mainstream coverage portrays the entire crypto industry as a scam.
Beyond major L1 coins such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana, there are broadly only two types of tokens that can perform well: first, projects that truly create value, generate cash flow, and whose tokens are tied to the underlying value of the project; second, Meme coins that capture value from broad cultural trends or moments. The problem with celebrity tokens is that they often belong to neither category. Even if they come with an actual business (such as Iggy Azalea's MOTHER), you are essentially buying into a startup with an extremely low success rate. And Meme coins are at their most successful precisely when they are not forcibly manufactured but emerge naturally—such as iconic tokens like DOGE, PEPE, and WIF, whose market caps climbed above $1 billion. Celebrity token issuance (at least in the cases so far) is neither.
Does this mean celebrities will stop issuing tokens forever, or that they will never succeed? Not necessarily. But the market has clearly matured to the point where it will not chase a token merely because it carries a big name. That is the silver lining in all of this. Another hope is that latecomers had better recognize: unless they truly bring something novel, they will ultimately only tarnish their own reputations.
Liquid Sidechain Exploited: The Cyber Threats Facing Bitcoin Are Escalating
The Bitcoin sidechain Liquid Network had 4,000 BTC stolen, worth about $320 million at the then-current price, and the attacker claimed to be a "white hat" hacker. This incident has been characterized as a warning about the rising new type of cyberattack threat to the Bitcoin ecosystem.
As a Bitcoin sidechain, Liquid carries cross-chain asset and settlement functions; the scale of this theft has also prompted renewed scrutiny of the fragile points in security models, custody arrangements, and emergency response for Bitcoin sidechains and layer-2 solutions.
OpenAI's "Mathematical Breakthrough": A Millennium Problem Mired in Controversy
As of the time of writing this briefing, the proof generated by OpenAI is still undergoing verification by external mathematicians, and the Clay Mathematics Institute still labels the problem as "active" rather than "solved." If it is ultimately verified, this will be one of the most significant mathematical discoveries made by an AI model.
One day before OpenAI's announcement, New York University mathematics professor Tristan Buckmaster issued a statement saying that he and Levent Alpöge, an employee of OpenAI competitor Anthropic, had been working on the Navier-Stokes (NS) problem for more than a year, during which they used multiple large language models including OpenAI's, and had made a breakthrough in the past month.
According to Buckmaster, when they heard that this frontier lab had learned of their progress, they proactively contacted OpenAI and were arranged to connect with OpenAI's Sebastien Bubeck. Bubeck invited Buckmaster to jointly publish the results, but requested that Alpöge not be credited because he was affiliated with Anthropic. When Buckmaster expressed hesitation, Bubeck asked him: "Why are you trying to destroy your career?"
This claim sparked anger in the mathematics community. At the heart of the controversy is whether OpenAI used Buckmaster and Alpöge's prompts and outputs to internally train its model to solve the equation. Buckmaster said he did not know whether the company did so, but suggested it might have. OpenAI's response also did not completely deny this possibility.
In a press release, OpenAI said: "We did not access any specific user data to solve this problem. Although it is highly unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their use of our products helped improve our models."
OpenAI said its motivation for studying the NS problem came from news that Anthropic was about to solve it, and it wanted to see "whether our model could do it too." Over the course of a week, it launched 10,000 agents and invested 88 hours in a rush to solve it. OpenAI estimated that it consumed about 300 billion output tokens in total, valued at about $10 million.
