Hunter Biden Says Democrats Have It Wrong on Crypto

Hunter Biden argues that Democrats who have spoken publicly about cryptocurrency often misunderstand it: he estimates that 90% are not educated about the technology and says the industry should do more to explain it. He says crypto was apolitical when he entered the field and can be used for good or harm. His interest grew through work with the UN World Food Program on cross-border digital money for refugees, where he saw potential for financial services beyond conventional banking.

Biden says crypto could help people excluded from the banking system, make international transfers without fees like those charged by Western Union, and enable microtransactions. He calls himself a crypto neophyte and says he understands skepticism toward political, celebrity and meme tokens, particularly after past failures. But he rejects the view, held by some progressives, that crypto is wholly harmful, arguing that critics have not adequately addressed the power of entrenched banks and the people their monopolies leave out.

Another speaker says crypto-industry election donations went to Republicans at a ratio of “two-plus to one” over Democrats, and argues that many Democrats have responded to the industry’s political support and Donald Trump’s crypto ventures rather than evaluating the technology itself. The speaker sees risks in Trump’s meme token and World Liberty Financial, particularly alongside foreign powers. They say legislation stalled because Trump would not accept its ethics provisions, and believe enough Democrats would otherwise have supported it to provide greater regulatory clarity. Even SEC or CFTC rulemaking, they caution, would not solve every problem.

Biden describes the Laptop token as an attempt to combine meme-driven attention with an embedded prediction market, which he calls the first of its kind. He says the allocation was 30% for the team, 20% for airdrops, 30% for prediction markets and 5% for charity. He presents charitable activity as a way to help make the crypto community sustainable. The prediction market was set to resolve whether Democrats would take control of both the House and Senate; Biden said data and anecdotal reports from Florida, Ohio, Texas and elsewhere made him expect Democrats to have a very good election night, while acknowledging he could be surprised.

Biden says he spent six months working 12 hours a day on the token and hired top law firms and market makers to avoid even the appearance of a rug pull, but says the launch looked like one. He accepts ultimate responsibility while assigning substantial responsibility for the price action to the market maker. According to Biden, the Groom Lake report said the contracted market maker had more than $500,000 in cash capital and more than $15 million for the decentralized exchange, but deployed only $5,000 and fewer than 30,000 tokens at launch.

Biden says the token launched at a $50 million FTV and was hovering around that level. He says a $6 purchase in the first seconds increased its market capitalization by 5%, briefly implying a $381 billion valuation that he calls fictional; he says nobody traded at that valuation. Nick Day says the token rose to around $37 after launch and later traded around 45 cents. Biden says no tokens had moved from the founders’ 30% allocation.