Hunter Biden crypto report reveals why LAPTOP’s $317 price was never real
LAPTOP briefly displayed a $317 price, but a new review says limited token availability and weak selling support made that figure impossible to realize.
Hunter Biden has released a review of LAPTOP’s troubled launch, one month after the memecoin climbed to $317 and then lost more than 98% within its first hour.
Why did the price of the token rise so easily? In answer to the question, the report says it was because very few LAPTOPs were available for purchase. When it came to those wishing to sell, there was not readily accessible cash to back up the figure that was listed on trading screens.
How LAPTOP reached $317 in two minutes
It was trading for $0.05 on the 9th of September, and less than two minutes later, LAPTOP was available at a price of $316.75!
Still, they could not exchange the tokens for hundreds of dollars each.
Groom Lake, the company that prepared the review, found that the average main trading pool, which should have opened at $35663.09, consisted of fewer than 30000 laptop tokens, or only 0.003%.
There were so few tokens that a purchase of $6.02 could cause the displayed price to increase by 5%.
More than 22,000 trades were executed in the first hour, pushing the quote higher and higher. The resulting price of $317 was comparable to a shop that displayed an expensive price tag but lacked available buyers or enough cash to purchase the stock at the high price.
Anyone attempting a major sale would have forced the price sharply lower.
Liquidity disappeared after the peak
The report also probed efforts to find two unnamed market makers who were hired to support trading.
A wallet thought to belong to the primary market-maker received $500,000 for launch, but only around $5,244 was initially provided to the main pool by this market-maker.
84 seconds after the price of LAPTOP made the peak, the wallet unloaded one position. Cash available within 5% of the display price of the sellers dropped from about $16,158 to 0 dollars.
16 seconds later, new liquidity, arranged in a different way, arrived, offering less support around the last transaction price. Other trading pools did indeed contain cash, such that one could claim that the exchange as a whole was not totally empty.
The review found that activity linked to the second market maker received about $2.18 million more in USDC than it spent. The first wallet’s trading positions also ended ahead, although its reported gain included capital and fees that may have been owed to a lender.
None of the companies was named. The report also didn’t say there was deliberate price manipulation and expressed only moderate confidence in its overall explanation.
The founder’s wallet, in contrast, still held all its 300 million LAPTOP until 2 October. While this supports Biden’s claim that the founders did not sell during the collapse, it didn’t answer all the questions people had about the launch.
Final Summary
The price of LAPTOP was because of extremely thin trading conditions, but holders couldn’t, in the real sense, receive the $317 that was quoted.
The report shows the link between scarcity, the massive selling, and changes in the cash available to sellers.
