How Hunter Biden’s Laptop Memecoin Could Help Base Compete With Robinhood
As Base looks to keep pace with Robinhood, Aerodrome's Alex Cutler explains how Hunter Biden's memecoin fits in
By: Zack Guzman
September 9, 2026
Love them or hate them, memecoins just won’t die. Case in point: Hunter Biden, the son of former President Joe Biden, is launching his own this week — named after his now infamous laptop.
Hunter took to X to drop a supercut of all the times the political talking heads mentioned his laptop, and to announce that $LAPTOP is launching on Base.
Maybe even more telling is how he framed things when he went on Tucker Carlson’s podcast a month ago.
“I really believe in cryptocurrency. I really believe in those things,” he said. “I want to do something in that space and you know, not because of any other thing than I believe in it — but you know what? I also want to make some money.”
And no doubt, Hunter Biden is set to collect. We know this because Trump’s $TRUMP memecoin, launched on Solana last year, netted Donald Trump more than $600 million, according to his income filings.
But something interesting happened this time: There was backlash before the token even launched.
“This is the equivalent of if somebody asked you to jump off a bridge, would you jump,” one X user wrote, calling it an I.Q. test. The backlash got so bad, Coinbase execs were responding to crypto influencers on X on a holiday like they were in full-blown spin mode.
Ironically, some of the most notorious memecoin promoters of last year suddenly were offended by the new launch — attacking Base, and Base infrastructure projects for giving it more attention. (Perhaps given the more than 90% declines in $TRUMP and $MELANIA, these people may have grown wary of the bloodbath that may soon ensue.)
In Base’s defense, anyone can launch anything on a public blockchain. But as a project who has worked with the Base team and seen the Base team operate, this does seem like one that had been given the green light by the powers that be. (We’ll get into that in a second.)
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For context, the $LAPTOP launch comes at a time when Robinhood’s new blockchain has been surging. Both are in the early days of trying to foster trading activity on their chains, and Robinhood has seen their activity explode, while Base has seen things stagnate this summer.
We chatted with Alex Cutler, the co-founder of Aerodrome — the leading decentralized exchange on Base — and it does seem like this is a launch that is being used to showcase the trading activity and experience on Base versus other blockchains (like Robinhood’s or Solana.)
“I think we’ve seen over the last few years that the sort of more cultural or speculative assets will always be a force onchain and they will always be a deeply polarizing topic,” Cutler tells us. “We know that this is never completely going away … but we do see that the growth of the onchain economy is likely not going to come from more and more of these types of assets. It’s going to come from onboarding trillion-dollar traditional assets onchain.”
Personally, it seems like an interesting test launch for the top DEX on Base. And it was fascinating to hear how this could just be a hook to get people interested and trading on Base.
Of course, buyer beware considering how these launches have gone over time for other tokens like it. We’ll be watching as $LAPTOP begins trading on September 9.
A Political Gift for CLARITY?
One layer above the debate about memecoins being a negative or a positive for the industry is the discussion on what it means for the CLARITY Act.
The Senate is set to vote on the bill next week — and the fate of America setting hard and fast rules for tokenized securities hangs in the balance. One of the longest running hangups has been the fact that Democrats risk losing too many political points among their supporters on the left by voting for a bill that might be seen as friendly to Trump’s pro-crypto agenda.
It’s unclear how Hunter Biden launching his own memecoin changes that game of politics considering this is happening right before the vote — but on the margin it would seem trickier to attack Trump, considering it’s now a Biden getting in on things while the getting is still good.
Odds are still low the CLARITY Act passes this year at just 15% — but hopes are rising that the SEC firms up some of its tokenization rules to let more and more funds bring their shares onchain.
We’ll chat with SEC Commissioner Peirce about this later this week.
How Coinage Fits Into All Of This
Last week, the Coinage Coop voted to approve a new proposal that could set us up to make history.
As Robinhood and Base continue to duke things out — and $LAPTOP launches on Base — $COINAGE will be launching on Robinhood chain (after debuting last year as the number one creator coin on Base.)
More details are set to come out this week, but it appears some people — including the largest DAO voting platform Snapshot — have already picked up on the alpha. After they shared the proposal publicly, $COINAGE gained another 70% for the week.
Our hope is to be the first major public project to straddle both Layer-2s, putting Coinage firmly at the intersection of the hottest battle in crypto right now.
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