It hit $100 billion,
then died in an hour.
Hunter Biden's coin launched, printed a fake $100 billion price tag in 100 seconds, and fell 99% before lunch. Here is who sold the top, who got wrecked, why the airdrop never really happened, and whether the team set itself up to cash out. Plain and short.
Built to be drained. And it was.
Up 3,000x in 100 seconds, then down 99.7% in a day. One of the worst on record.
The pool opened with $26k of buy orders and no coins to sell. A tiny pool set a giant, fake price.
1 in 10 buyers came out ahead. Ten wallets took over half of all the profit.
Fake price, insiders selling, millions moved to exchanges with no announcement. The team-run airdrop is still 99% loaded.
The crash, minute by minute
All times are in UTC. The price is what people actually paid.
| Time | Price | What was happening |
|---|---|---|
| 12:02 | $0.11 | First trade. A $127 buy into a pool with no coins to sell. |
| +1 min | $169 | Buyers with nothing to buy from push the price up 1,500x. |
| +1m42s | $316 | The top. One $125,000 buy set it. Every "$100 billion" screenshot is this moment. |
| +5 min | $229 | 568 wallets have already sold $4.4M into the crowd. |
| +30 min | $22.60 | The air comes out. Down 93% from the top. |
| +1 hour | $5.52 | Down 98%. It briefly passes Trump's coin on paper, on the way down. |
| +2 hours | $1.26 | Kraken, KuCoin and Bitvavo have all listed it. No Coinbase. |
| Now | $0.83 | Down 99.7% from the top. This is where the report is written. |
About that $100 billion. It was never real. At the top one coin briefly changed hands near $316, which works out to about $110 billion in market cap, the number the screeners showed, or $316 billion if you count every coin including the locked ones. Either way it was a mirage. The pool that set the price held less than $30,000 of real money. The big number was a headline, not a value.
Why it crashed so fast
Not a hack, not a rug. Just an empty shelf.
Picture a shop that opens with a queue outside and nothing on the shelves. The first customer offers a silly price because there's nothing to compare it to. That is exactly what the trading pool looked like at 12:02.
No coins were for sale. In the ten hours before launch, someone added about $26,000 of buy orders to the pool and not a single coin to sell. So the first buyers had nothing to buy. Their orders shoved the price from 11 cents to $169 in under a minute.
Then the sellers showed up. Anyone who already held coins could now sell to buyers who had just paid up to $316. In the first five minutes, 568 wallets sold $4.4M. Ten of them took two thirds of it.
The people who sold the top were not ordinary buyers. The biggest seller was an automated trading bot. The market maker, GSR, was the main seller after that, doing its paid job of providing coins to buy. Regular people mostly showed up later, and lower, and lost.
A tiny pool set a giant price, and the people already holding coins cashed the giant price in.
The airdrop barely happened
This was supposed to send free coins to 90,000 Substack subscribers. It didn't.
| People who claimed | 747 | Out of a list the team called 90,000-plus. |
| Coins handed out | 1% | The other 99% is still sitting in the contract. |
| First claim | 12:06 | Four minutes after launch. So the site was working. |
| Claimers who sold | 19 | They took about $674,000 out. The other 728 held and watched it fall. |
| Trump-loser coins | 0 | A separate 20 million coin batch was never handed out at all. |
What a claim was worth. The standard claim was 784 coins. In the first hour that was worth up to a quarter of a million dollars. Today it's worth about $650. The free money was the best trade of the day, and almost nobody collected it.
Either the real eligible list was tiny and the "90,000 subscribers" was mostly noise, or the claim website was so clunky that almost nobody got through. The chain can't tell you which. But it can tell you the flood of airdrop selling I expected before launch never came. Only 19 people sold their free coins. The selling that crushed the price came from somewhere else.
And here's the part that matters for the next section: the airdrop wasn't a public list anyone could check. The team's own server decided who could claim and how much, one wallet at a time. Nobody outside the team can see who was really on that list.
Who made money, who got wrecked
Every wallet that bought on Base in the first 13 hours. Nine in ten are down.
| Lost almost everything | 10,012 | Bought the big number, held the big number. |
| Lost most of it | 15,009 | Bought the "dip" that kept dipping. |
| Lost some | 9,436 | Small bets, or got out quick. |
| Made money | 3,633 | One in ten. Most of them the very first buyers and bots. |
The worst place to be all day was the first five minutes after the top. Those buyers chased the number and almost none got out. The people who waited more than an hour lost the least. There was no dip to buy. It just went down.
Winners were a tiny club. The ten best wallets took more than half of all the profit made on-chain. For everyone else this was a wealth transfer from thousands of latecomers to a handful of bots and early sellers.
Independent check: the analytics firm Bubblemaps counted 80% of buyers losing across 11,500 wallets, and most of the top holders in brand-new wallets. My count is bigger and worse because I include everyone and price it as of now.
Did the team set itself up to cash out?
Some of this will never be confirmed. So here are the odds, straight from the chain.
The airdrop only paid out when the team's private server approved each wallet. No public list. Nobody can check who was really eligible.
The claim contract is upgradeable, pausable, and has a burn switch. The team can change the rules or delete the leftovers whenever they want.
79M free coins sit in that team-controlled contract right now. Signable to any wallet, or burnable, at will.
Treasury moved 30M four minutes in. Wintermute sold $2.4M. The people with coins to sell sold into the one hour with buyers.
729 of 747 claim wallets are the email-login wallets the airdrop was built for. Not a bot farm.
Only 19 of 747 claimers sold. A self-airdrop-and-dump would be a flood. It isn't there.
Nobody has shown fake Substack accounts. A fair suspicion, given how few claimed, but not evidence.
Bottom line. Down 99.7% on day one. A fake price on an empty pool, insiders and market makers selling into it, and the team quietly moving millions to exchanges with no announcement. Whether or not a court ever calls it fraud, for everyone who bought, it worked exactly like a scam. The only open question left is who gets the 79M still sitting in the team's own contract.
Where the big wallets went
The coins the team and its partners control, and what each did on day one.
Founders300.0MLocked, didn't move. Sitting in a custody wallet since the night before launch.Prediction burns300.0MLocked, didn't move. No coins burned yet.Future airdrop100.0MLocked, didn't move.Airdrop contract79.2MPaid 747 claims. The 99% nobody claimed is still in here. The team can burn it.Liquidity57.5MHanded 42.5M to market makers and others. Including 14.5M to an unlabelled wallet three hours before launch, which still hasn't sold a coin.Treasury B50.0MDidn't move.Treasury A20.0MSent 30M to a fresh wallet at 12:06, four minutes in. 5M of it reached an exchange-style address by 13:16.Trump-loser airdrop17.0MNever handed out. Filled the claim contract, then parked the rest.GSR8.3MMade the market. Ran the pool all day, ended slightly lighter. Not a dump.Wintermute0.6MSold. 2.5M loan turned into $2.39M of selling and exchange deposits. The biggest known seller.Foundation0.9MPaid voters. Put 4.1M coins into an Aerodrome vote-bribe pot, released overnight as the price halved again.The move to watch. That 30 million from the treasury sits in a fresh wallet, with 25 million still in it. The 14.5 million from before launch sits unlabelled and unsold. Both are supply that can drop on a thin market whenever the team wants. The disclosures allow it. The pre-launch quote from Hunter was "you should not expect me or anyone else to make this token more valuable." Believe that one.
The exchanges were the exit
Kraken, KuCoin and Bitvavo all listed within two hours. Did people use them to get out?
What listed, and when
- KuCoin, about 13:30.
- Kraken, 13:55, first trade $2.10. It listed even after deleting its own promo post the day before.
- Bitvavo, around 14:00.
- Not Coinbase, and not Bybit. The one big exit door never opened.
Did on-chain buyers cash out there?
Mostly no. On-chain holders got out by selling straight into the trading pools, around $11 million over the day. The large flows onto exchanges came from the market maker Wintermute, which sent roughly $2 million of coins to Kraken, Gate and KuCoin deposit wallets, and from the team's own treasury consolidation. There was no wave of ordinary buyers bridging to the new listings, and little reason for one: every venue was crashing together, so there was no higher price on the exchanges to sell into. The listings were an exit for people who bought on the exchanges, not for people who bought on-chain.
Every wallet in this report, tracked live
The Vault follows the treasury, the market makers and the airdrop in real time, and covers the next launch before it opens. Free Discord.
How my launch-day calls did
I published the odds in Brief 001. Here's the honest mark.
| What I said | What happened | Mark |
|---|---|---|
| Most likely it drops 20 to 30% then recovers | It dropped 98% and didn't recover. I sized the fall around airdrop selling that never came. | Wrong |
| Worst case it tanks for days | This is what happened. Right call, wrong reason: I thought claimers would dump, and they didn't. | Right |
| There's no way to snipe it, no edge at the open | Wrong. The empty pool was the edge. First-block buyers and bots took $4.4M out in five minutes. | Wrong |
| The locked coins are just a promise, watch them | They held. Moved into custody the night before and haven't budged. | Right |
| If a treasury wallet hits an exchange, the team is selling | It did, at 12:06. The trigger fired in the first hour. | Right |
| A listing means sell into it | Kraken, KuCoin and Bitvavo all listed inside two hours. They were the exit, as written. | Right |
The one lesson I'm keeping. I studied the coins and the people and got most of that right. I didn't check the pool. On a launch like this, the first question is simple: is there anything to actually buy? Here the answer was no, and that one fact explains the whole crazy open better than anything in my first report.
What happens next
The dates that matter, and the coins still hanging over the market.
First scheduled coin burn if the Eagles win. A rare reason for good news.
Whatever nobody claimed gets burned or given to charity. At today's rate that's about 79 million coins.
Sitting in a fresh wallet. If it moves to an exchange, it's more selling.
Left the project before launch, still parked, still a mystery.
The biggest scheduled event tied to burns.
12.5M a month starts flowing to the team. The opposite of a burn.
The short version: tens of millions of coins are sitting in team wallets waiting for a bid that isn't there. The only thing that would change the picture is a Coinbase listing, which the betting markets put at roughly one in six. Until then this trades like the airdrop looked: almost nobody home.
Next coin, same treatment, before it launches
Pre-launch report, live wallet map, exit calls as they happen. Free.