Hunter Biden’s new novelty crypto token flopped Wednesday morning, losing more than 95 percent of its value in a matter of hours of its launch. The son of former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. had criticized President Trump’s own such token, called a memecoin, as a “grift.” Critics immediately said the younger Mr. Biden’s was no different.

In a social media post Tuesday night on X, Mr. Biden presented his new coin partly as a mechanism to make charitable donations. He did not address whether and how he would personally benefit, but creators of memecoins can profit from transaction fees or if their own tokens rise in value. Memecoins are akin to collectibles, with no intrinsic value. Their worth is driven purely by demand and speculation.

Mr. Biden’s coin, $LAPT OP, started trading at $37.26, jumped to $222.75 within minutes, then plummeted to $1.34 by midafternoon, according to Coin Market Cap. The token’s name refers to his laptop, the source of controversy when it was discovered in a computer repair shop and its contents leaked before the 2020 election.

Mr. Trump took in a whopping $636 million from sales of his $TRUMP memecoin last year, according to his latest financial disclosure. As of the middle of last year, 58 buyers had gained a total of about $1.1 billion in profits. Some 764,000 crypto wallets, most with small holdings, lost money, the firm’s data shows. The president’s coin, having once peaked around $74, was selling Wednesday for $2.15.