Hunter Biden’s Great Crypto Comeback – Is Hunter Running?

There is a particular kind of comeback the United States can’t resist: the public figure who was written off, who stops apologizing, and who simply starts talking like himself. Hunter Biden — convicted, caricatured, and for most of a decade the most relentlessly litigated son in American politics — appears to have found the one venue where that script still runs. Not a network sit-down. Not a ghostwritten op-ed. A dusted-off account on X, and a series of posts that read less like crisis management than like a man who has decided he no longer has anything to lose.

The remarkable part is what he chose to talk about. Amid the deepest crypto drawdown in two years, Biden has spent the past week posting about Bitcoin, the blockchain, and the future of money with a candor that the industry’s own founders rarely match in public. And the industry, which has every reason to be cynical, has mostly responded by leaning in.

The X posts that did it

It began, as these things do, with a list. Biden posted the things he claims most Americans actually agree on — the cost of groceries, tariffs, lawmakers trading stocks, endless wars, and Jeffrey Epstein — a populist inventory that went viral precisely because it refused to sort neatly into left or right. A crypto-native account, Gmoney — a general partner at Delphi’s INFINFT and a well-known collector of tokenized art — quote-posted it joking that Biden was running for president. Biden’s reply was to ask Gmoney to help him “win the crypto vote.”

Then came the line that turned a meme into a story. Asked how he would take on what Gmoney called Senator Elizabeth Warren’s “anti-crypto army,” Biden answered with a single word: “Hyperliquid.” It was glib, it was unmistakably online, and it landed in 1.56 million feeds. But the substance arrived a beat later, when he was asked what he actually thinks of the fiat financial system. His answer is worth quoting in full, because it is the thesis of the whole week: “Fiat is a sham, the banking class is corrupt, decentralized digital currency and the blockchain are the inevitable future, and the incumbents will fight it to the death.”

You could have pulled that sentence from a Bitcoin white-paper forum circa 2014. That it came instead from the son of the president whose SEC spent four years suing the industry into submission is the entire point.

He kept going. Praising a piece by the digital artist Beeple, Biden wrote that when he set out to sell his own art, “I wanted every piece on the blockchain and to accept Bitcoin as payment,” crediting Andreas Antonopoulos’s The Internet of Money with opening his eyes. In a separate interview with Candace Owens, he added: “I believe in the meme token. I’ll do something one day and create a community. There’s really good reasons to do it.”

HUNTER BIDEN SAVING CRYPTO, said Beeple on X

Why the candor reads as rehabilitation

Strip away the politics and what’s left is a case study in reputation repair that any communications strategist would envy — precisely because it looks like the opposite of strategy.

For ten years, Hunter Biden was a character written by other people: a laptop, a plea deal, a punchline. The defining feature of that decade was that he was always being explained, never explaining himself. The X posts invert that. They are unpolished, occasionally combative, and entirely his own voice. Custodia Bank founder Caitlin Long captured the shift when she welcomed him to “Crypto Twitter,” noting that the caricature of Biden never squared with the man who’d gotten into Yale Law. The crowd that has every incentive to distrust a latecomer instead extended a hand.

That is the mechanism. Crypto, more than almost any community in American public life, rewards conviction over credentials and candor over polish. It is a culture built by people who were themselves dismissed — by banks, by regulators, by the financial establishment Biden is now calling corrupt. A man arriving with genuine-sounding conviction and a good origin story (he read the Antonopoulos book; he wanted his art on-chain before it was fashionable) is speaking the native language. The rehabilitation isn’t being granted by gatekeepers. It’s being earned, post by post, in the one square where the old gatekeepers have no standing.

The crypto backdrop makes the timing extraordinary

Biden chose to plant this flag at the market’s bleakest moment, which only sharpens the contrarian appeal. Bitcoin is trading near $62,000, down more than 50% from its October 2025 all-time high around $126,200, having shed its safe-haven pretensions and traded like a pure risk asset through the U.S.–Iran conflict and a run of sticky inflation data. This is not the giddy top of a cycle when every celebrity wants in. It’s the part where most of them go quiet.

His chosen shorthand, Hyperliquid, is itself the most interesting tell. This is not a vanity memecoin — it’s the on-chain perpetuals exchange that became an unlikely macro-trading venue during the Iran war, when its WTI oil perps traded hours before traditional markets reopened and contract volume ballooned from $339 million to $7.3 billion in roughly two weeks. Its HYPE token is up about 133% year-to-date even after a brutal week that saw it fall from a $75.51 all-time high to the high-$50s, pressured by a scheduled $700 million token unlock and Arthur Hayes exiting his position. Naming Hyperliquid to needle Warren — whose office, with Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, pushed the CFTC to probe exactly that oil-futures activity — was not a random meme. It was a man who has done the reading, picking the single asset most likely to irritate the industry’s most powerful skeptic.

So, is he running?

This is where the comeback narrative gets genuinely tantalizing, and where it’s worth staying honest. Asked directly, Biden has waved off a presidential bid, calling it “not something” he thinks about, and prediction markets agree: Kalshi gives him roughly a 1.7% shot at the 2028 Democratic nomination, against Gavin Newsom’s 21%. On the numbers, he is not running.

But that may be the most powerful part of the story. He doesn’t have to run to win something here. By refusing the candidate’s careful crouch — and instead telling both parties to “truly understand the value and potential utility of cryptocurrency rather than just use it as a pet political issue for power or abuse it for financial gain” — Biden has positioned himself as the rare voice criticizing crypto’s politicization from inside the tent. In a cycle where the sitting president’s family is fielding conflict-of-interest accusations over its own crypto ventures, a Biden calling for sincerity rather than self-dealing is, improbably, the cleaner act.

The skeptics aren’t wrong to keep one eyebrow raised. Number Go Up author Zeke Faux has already asked, only half-joking, how long before Biden “does a memecoin scam,” and investor Lyn Alden pre-emptively pleaded with him to “skip the arc where you launch a token.” The history of celebrity crypto is a graveyard of exactly that. If a HUNTER coin appears next month, this column will have aged badly, and the doubters will deserve their victory lap.

But that isn’t what happened this week. What happened this week is that a man the entire political machine spent a decade defining for him picked up his phone, said what he actually thinks about money and power, and was met — in the most cynical corner of the internet — with something close to respect. Whether or not it ever reaches a ballot, that’s a comeback. And it is a very American one.