Jensen Huang's Crypto Past: From the "Crypto Hangover" to Onchain Price Discovery

On Sunday afternoon, with Nasdaq still closed, Jensen Huang's scandal had already opened for trading in crypto.

The onchain Nvidia contract fell nearly 4% in an hour, and two prediction markets opened new books on his departure, one after the other.

Huang was never really a crypto person. But eight years ago, it was crypto that wiped out half of Nvidia's stock price in a single quarter.

That account has been reckoned for nine years, and it still isn't settled.

01. The Two Years Miners Held Up

On the August 2017 earnings call, Huang said: "Cryptocurrency and blockchain are here to stay, and they're going to be big."

Half a year later, in an interview with Barron's, he said it again: "Crypto is real. It's not going away."

He had grounds for saying so. In those two years, miners were Nvidia's least picky buyers. In May 2018, CFO Colette Kress disclosed that crypto-specific products alone sold $289 million that quarter.

Three months later, that number was down to just $18 million.

In November 2018, it was Huang's turn to change his tune: "The crypto hangover lasted longer than we expected."

Unsellable graphics cards piled up in the channel. Nvidia projected it could book only $2.7 billion in revenue for the next quarter; Wall Street had expected $3.4 billion. Anyone who bought Nvidia at the end of September held less than half their money by Christmas — a 54% drop, the worst performer in the S&P 500 that quarter.

He was the one who said it would stay, and he was the one who called the hangover, and only nine months separated the two.

02. This Account Isn't Settled Yet

The stock price came back later. The lawsuits didn't.

In May 2022, the SEC settled the first account. It found that in two consecutive quarterly reports in fiscal 2018, Nvidia discussed only the surge in its gaming business without disclosing that a large part of that growth came from mining. Nvidia paid a $5.5 million fine, neither admitting nor denying.

For Nvidia, that fine was nothing much; the trouble was on the investors' side.

In 2018, a group of investors took Nvidia to court, alleging the company concealed more than $1 billion in mining-related graphics card sales. That case ran from Trump's first term into his second.

Dismissed at first instance, revived on appeal, Nvidia kept appealing all the way to the Supreme Court. In December 2024, the Supreme Court sent the case back as "improvidently granted" — one sentence, no reasoning attached.

In March this year, Judge Haywood Gilliam of the Northern District of California granted class certification, covering investors who bought Nvidia stock between August 2017 and November 2018. Nvidia asked the Ninth Circuit to review, with amicus briefs from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other organizations in support, and was turned down again on May 26.

Certification is not a finding that Nvidia is liable. The case is now in the discovery phase, with no trial date yet. The plaintiffs' core allegation is that Nvidia told the world what it sold to miners was mainly dedicated mining cards, when in fact nearly two-thirds were Nvidia's gaming cards — the GeForce line.

In other words, what the plaintiffs want to prove is that many of those "gamers" back then were actually miners.

Nvidia has never admitted misleading investors. But eight years on, how many mining cards were sold and to whom remains an account that doesn't balance.

03. From Limiting Mining to Praising Bittensor

Huang said out loud that crypto would stay, while the company's hands were pushing it away.

In February 2021, Nvidia put a lock on the newly released GeForce RTX 3060: a driver cut Ethereum mining efficiency in half, and Nvidia launched a separate CMP mining card line sold specifically to miners.

Matt Wuebbling, who headed GeForce marketing, put it plainly in a blog post: "We designed GeForce for gamers." The meaning: gaming cards stay with gamers, miners should go buy CMP.

Ironically, a few weeks later a developer driver Nvidia itself released accidentally opened the lock, and the company later acknowledged and fixed it.

CMP mining cards sold $550 million in fiscal 2022, less than one-twentieth of the $12.4 billion gaming business in the same period. In September 2022, Ethereum moved to proof of stake and no longer needed graphics cards for mining, and that business came to an end.

Half a year later, Nvidia CTO Michael Kagan told The Guardian that crypto "doesn't bring anything useful for society. AI does."

That was the CTO speaking, not Huang. ChatGPT had just taken off, and Nvidia's graphics cards had already swapped in a new set of buyers.

The turn came in March this year. During the GTC conference, Huang appeared on the All-In Podcast, and host Chamath Palihapitiya brought up Bittensor — a network that rewards people with tokens for contributing compute to jointly train AI models. Huang endorsed the distributed-training approach, seeing it as complementary to closed-source models.

That month, TAO rose from about $180 to above $332.

He was praising the technical approach and didn't mention the token. But from the CTO's "useless" to the CEO's nod, the crypto crowd in Nvidia's telling had changed shape: no longer miners grabbing graphics cards, but people using compute to do AI.

04. Miners Became Big Customers

Nvidia is changing. Miners are changing faster.

The reason isn't complicated: mining is getting harder and harder to make money at. According to CoinShares, in the fourth quarter of 2025, the weighted average cash cost for listed miners to mine one bitcoin was about $80,000.

Mining farms have power, land and machine rooms; what AI companies lack is exactly these. As of the end of March this year, listed bitcoin miners had signed AI and high-performance computing contracts worth more than $70 billion cumulatively.

The one that has gone the furthest is IREN. In November 2025, it signed a five-year contract worth about $9.7 billion with Microsoft, supplying compute to Microsoft with Nvidia GB300 graphics cards.

In May this year, it signed another five-year contract worth about $3.4 billion with Nvidia, providing GPU cloud services to Nvidia's internal AI and research teams at its Childress, Texas campus. In the same deal, IREN also gave Nvidia a warrant: the right to buy up to 30 million shares at $70 per share within five years — about $2.1 billion if fully exercised.

Eight years ago, miners fought gamers over Nvidia's graphics cards. Now a bitcoin mining company is supplying compute to Nvidia in return, and Nvidia might become one of its shareholders.

The roles have completely reversed.

The benefit is a steady order book; the price is that miners' equipment, customers and financing are tied even more tightly to Nvidia.

05. The Scandal Weekend, and Crypto Opened the Market First

And then came this weekend.

On October 29, according to The New York Times, U.S. intelligence officials believe Alice Huang, a former executive at the Singapore company Megaspeed, was passing information to Beijing, and that she is close to Jensen Huang.

The Chinese Embassy in the U.S. called this a "baseless smear." Singapore's Ministry of Home Affairs said the government has not investigated Alice Huang, but the Megaspeed case is still under investigation.

On Sunday, November 8, Nvidia's board announced it was launching an independent investigation, while saying there was no reason to believe national security or company secrets had been compromised. The same day, Huang posted a letter on the company website acknowledging an extramarital affair: "There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry."

Nasdaq wouldn't open until Monday; crypto took the trades first.

Hyperliquid has a perpetual contract tracking Nvidia's stock price that can trade on weekends even when U.S. stocks are closed. After the news came out, the timeline went like this:

• At 3:03 p.m. ET, onchain Nvidia began falling on heavy volume.
• At 3:22 p.m., Kalshi opened three new markets, including "Jensen Huang out before January 1, 2027."
• At 4:17 p.m., Polymarket listed "Will Jensen Huang announce resignation or be removed before the end of the year?"

In under an hour and a half, all three books were open.

Onchain volume suddenly heated up. Previously weekend volume was only just over $500,000 an hour; from 3 p.m. to 8 p.m., it ran about $24.5 million an hour, a more than 40-fold increase.

Starting at 6:57 p.m. ET on Sunday, the price sat at $179.27 for a full ten minutes. That is exactly 5% below the reference price — the lowest price the rules allow on weekends — and it could not fall any further. Only after 8 p.m., when the overnight session opened and outside quotes returned, did the price break below that line.

As of the afternoon of November 9 Beijing time, Polymarket put the probability of him leaving before year-end at 15%, and Kalshi put the probability of him leaving before January 1, 2027 at 18%.

There are two ways to read these numbers.

One is that Nvidia and crypto are already bound tightly together: the miners of that year became its customers and compute suppliers, and when it ran into trouble, the first to price it was also the chain.

The other is that this is just another round of speculation around a celebrity: that Polymarket book saw about $150,000 in volume, negligible against Nvidia's multi-trillion-dollar market cap, and the onchain contract priced on its own for only about five hours.

U.S. stocks open at 22:30 Beijing time tonight; Nvidia reports third-quarter results in the early morning of November 18 Beijing time, and the independent investigation has no timetable yet.

Eight years ago, crypto's hangover made him change his tune.

This time, it's crypto that is pricing him.

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