A revived X account, blunt discuss fiat and the blockchain, a one-word reply to Elizabeth Warren, candid confessions about his squalid previous. Joe Biden’s son is rehabilitating himself within the open — and crypto twitter is the place it is occurring. Is Hunter Biden working? Is that this a Nice American Comeback story?
There’s a explicit sort of comeback the US can’t resist: the general public determine who was written off, who stops apologizing, and who merely begins speaking like himself. Hunter Biden — convicted, caricatured, and for many of a decade essentially the most relentlessly litigated son in American politics — seems to have discovered the one venue the place that script nonetheless runs. Not a community sit-down. Not a ghostwritten op-ed. A dusted-off account on X, and a collection of posts that learn much less like disaster administration than like a person who has determined he not has something to lose.
The outstanding half is what he selected to speak about. Amid the deepest crypto drawdown in two years, Biden has spent the previous week posting about Bitcoin, the blockchain, and the way forward for cash with a candor that the business’s personal founders hardly ever match in public. And the business, which has each motive to be cynical, has largely responded by leaning in.
The X posts that did it
It started, as these items do, with an inventory. Biden posted the issues he claims most People really agree on — the price of groceries, tariffs, lawmakers buying and selling shares, limitless wars, and Jeffrey Epstein — a populist stock that went viral exactly as a result of it refused to type neatly into left or proper. A crypto-native account, Gmoney — a basic associate at Delphi’s INFINFT and a widely known collector of tokenized artwork — quote-posted it joking that Biden was working for president. Biden’s reply was to ask Gmoney to assist him “win the crypto vote.”
Then got here the road that turned a meme right into a story. Requested how he would tackle what Gmoney known as Senator Elizabeth Warren’s “anti-crypto military,” Biden answered with a single phrase: “Hyperliquid.” It was glib, it was unmistakably on-line, and it landed in 1.56 million feeds. However the substance arrived a beat later, when he was requested what he really thinks of the fiat monetary system. His reply is value quoting in full, as a result of it’s the thesis of the entire week: “Fiat is a sham, the banking class is corrupt, decentralized digital foreign money and the blockchain are the inevitable future, and the incumbents will combat it to the demise.”
You can have pulled that sentence from a Bitcoin white-paper discussion board circa 2014. That it got here as an alternative from the son of the president whose SEC spent 4 years suing the business into submission is the whole level.
He saved going. Praising a bit by the digital artist Beeple, Biden wrote that when he got down to promote his personal artwork, “I wished each piece on the blockchain and to simply accept Bitcoin as fee,” crediting Andreas Antonopoulos’s The Web of Cash with opening his eyes. In a separate interview with Candace Owens, he added: “I consider within the meme token. I’ll do one thing in the future and create a group. There’s actually good causes to do it.”
HUNTER BIDEN SAVING CRYPTO, mentioned Beeple on X
Why the candor reads as rehabilitation
Strip away the politics and what’s left is a case research in popularity restore that any communications strategist would envy — exactly as a result of it appears like the alternative of technique.
For ten years, Hunter Biden was a personality written by different folks: a laptop computer, a plea deal, a punchline. The defining characteristic of that decade was that he was all the time being defined, by no means explaining himself. The X posts invert that. They’re unpolished, sometimes combative, and fully his personal voice. Custodia Financial institution founder Caitlin Lengthy captured the shift when she welcomed him to “Crypto Twitter,” noting that the caricature of Biden by no means squared with the person who’d gotten into Yale Legislation. The group that has each incentive to mistrust a latecomer as an alternative prolonged a hand.
That’s the mechanism. Crypto, greater than virtually any group in American public life, rewards conviction over credentials and candor over polish. It’s a tradition constructed by individuals who had been themselves dismissed — by banks, by regulators, by the monetary institution Biden is now calling corrupt. A person arriving with genuine-sounding conviction and an excellent origin story (he learn the Antonopoulos guide; he wished his artwork on-chain earlier than it was modern) is talking the native language. The rehabilitation isn’t being granted by gatekeepers. It’s being earned, submit by submit, within the one sq. the place the previous gatekeepers don’t have any standing.
The crypto backdrop makes the timing extraordinary
Biden selected to plant this flag on the market’s bleakest second, which solely sharpens the contrarian attraction. Bitcoin is buying and selling close to $62,000, down greater than 50% from its October 2025 all-time excessive round $126,200, having shed its safe-haven pretensions and traded like a pure threat asset by means of the U.S.–Iran battle and a run of sticky inflation knowledge. This isn’t the giddy prime of a cycle when each celeb desires in. It’s the half the place most of them go quiet.
His chosen shorthand, Hyperliquid, is itself essentially the most fascinating inform. This isn’t an arrogance memecoin — it’s the on-chain perpetuals alternate that grew to become an unlikely macro-trading venue throughout the Iran battle, when its WTI oil perps traded hours earlier than conventional markets reopened and contract quantity ballooned from $339 million to $7.three billion in roughly two weeks. Its HYPE token is up about 133% year-to-date even after a brutal week that noticed it fall from a $75.51 all-time excessive to the high-$50s, pressured by a scheduled $700 million token unlock and Arthur Hayes exiting his place. Naming Hyperliquid to needle Warren — whose workplace, with Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, pushed the CFTC to probe precisely that oil-futures exercise — was not a random meme. It was a person who has finished the studying, selecting the one asset almost definitely to annoy the business’s strongest skeptic.
So, is he working?
That is the place the comeback narrative will get genuinely tantalizing, and the place it’s value staying trustworthy. Requested straight, Biden has waved off a presidential bid, calling it “not one thing” he thinks about, and prediction markets agree: Kalshi offers him roughly a 1.7% shot on the 2028 Democratic nomination, towards Gavin Newsom’s 21%. On the numbers, he’s not working.
However that could be essentially the most highly effective a part of the story. He doesn’t need to run to win one thing right here. By refusing the candidate’s cautious crouch — and as an alternative telling each events to “really perceive the worth and potential utility of cryptocurrency fairly than simply use it as a pet political challenge for energy or abuse it for monetary achieve” — Biden has positioned himself because the uncommon voice criticizing crypto’s politicization from contained in the tent. In a cycle the place the sitting president’s household is fielding conflict-of-interest accusations over its personal crypto ventures, a Biden calling for sincerity fairly than self-dealing is, improbably, the cleaner act.
The skeptics aren’t fallacious to maintain one eyebrow raised. Quantity Go Up writer Zeke Fake has already requested, solely half-joking, how lengthy earlier than Biden “does a memecoin rip-off,” and investor Lyn Alden pre-emptively pleaded with him to “skip the arc the place you launch a token.” The historical past of celeb crypto is a graveyard of precisely that. If a HUNTER coin seems subsequent month, this column could have aged badly, and the doubters will deserve their victory lap.
However that isn’t what occurred this week. What occurred this week is {that a} man the whole political machine spent a decade defining for him picked up his telephone, mentioned what he really thinks about cash and energy, and was met — in essentially the most cynical nook of the web — with one thing near respect. Whether or not or not it ever reaches a poll, that’s a comeback. And it’s a very American one.
Troy Miller Troy Miller Read More
