Jensen Huang's History in Crypto: From "Crypto Hangover" to On-Chain Listing

On Sunday afternoon, with Nasdaq still closed, Jensen Huang's scandal had already kicked off trading in the crypto space.

On-chain Nvidia contracts dropped nearly 4% in an hour, as two prediction markets sequentially opened new odds on his departure.

Jensen Huang has never been one for the crypto community. But eight years ago, it was precisely that crowd that caused Nvidia's stock price to fall by half in a single quarter.

This bill of reckoning has been tallied for nine years, yet remains unsettled.

The Two Years Bolstered by Miners

At the August 2017 earnings call, Jensen Huang said, “Cryptocurrency and blockchain will always exist, and they will become very big.”

Half a year later, in an interview with Barron's, he repeated it: “Crypto is real, and it won’t go away.”

He spoke with confidence. During those two years, miners were Nvidia’s most indiscriminate buyers. In May 2018, CFO Colette Kress revealed that the company sold $289 million worth of crypto-specific products alone that quarter.

Three months later, that figure plummeted to just $18 million.

In November 2018, it was Jensen Huang’s turn to backtrack: “The crypto hangover is lasting longer than we anticipated.”

Unsold GPUs piled up in distribution channels. Nvidia forecast revenue of only $2.7 billion for the next quarter, whereas Wall Street had expected $3.4 billion. Those who bought Nvidia stock in late September saw their holdings cut by more than half before Christmas—a 54% drop, finishing dead last among S&P 500 companies that quarter.

He was the one who said it would always be there, and he was also the one shouting about a hangover, with merely nine months between the statements.

This Bill Hasn't Been Fully Tallied Yet

The stock price later recovered, but the lawsuits did not.

In May 2022, the SEC settled the first score. It determined that in sequential quarterly reports during fiscal 2018, Nvidia highlighted a surge in gaming sales without disclosing that a substantial portion of that growth stemmed from mining. Nvidia paid a $5.5 million fine while neither admitting nor denying the allegations.

For Nvidia, this fine was negligible. The real trouble lay on the investor side.

In 2018, a group of investors sued Nvidia, alleging the company concealed over $1 billion in GPU sales tied to mining. The litigation spanned from Trump’s first term into his second.

Dismissed at the trial level, reinstated on appeal, Nvidia appealed all the way to the Supreme Court. In December 2024, the Court remanded the case due to improper jurisdiction, issuing a single sentence without explanation.

In March, U.S. District Judge Haywood Gilliam of the Northern District of California certified the class action, covering investors who purchased Nvidia stock between August 2017 and November 2018. Nvidia sought review from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, backed by amicus briefs from institutions like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, but was denied on May 26.

Certification does not establish liability. The case is now in the discovery phase, with no trial date set. The core allegation is that while Nvidia publicly claimed it primarily sold dedicated mining cards to miners, nearly two-thirds were actually its gaming GPUs—the GeForce series.

In other words, plaintiffs aim to prove that many so-called “gamers” back then were actually miners.

Nvidia has never admitted to misleading investors. But eight years on, exactly how many mining cards were sold and to whom remains an unresolved ledger item.

From Restricting Mining to Praising Bittensor

While Huang verbally affirms that crypto will endure, the company actively pushed back.

In February 2021, Nvidia locked down its newly released GeForce RTX 3060: using drivers to halve Ethereum mining efficiency, while simultaneously launching the CMP line exclusively for miners.

Matt Wuebbling, head of GeForce marketing, clarified in a blog post: “We design GeForce for gamers.” The message was clear: save gaming cards for gamers; let miners buy CMP.

Ironically, weeks later, a developer driver released by Nvidia itself accidentally bypassed the lock, which the company subsequently acknowledged and patched.

CMP mining cards generated $550 million in FY2022, less than one-twentieth of the $12.4 billion gaming business during the same period. By September 2022, Ethereum’s transition to proof-of-stake eliminated the need for GPU mining, ending this venture.

Half a year later, Nvidia CTO Michael Kagan told The Guardian that crypto “has brought nothing useful to society; only AI has.”

This came from the CTO, not Jensen Huang. At the time, ChatGPT had just exploded in popularity, and Nvidia’s GPUs had already found a new buyer base.

The turning point arrived this past March. During the GTC conference, Huang appeared on the All-In podcast, where host Chamath Palihapitiya brought up Bittensor. It’s a network that rewards participants with tokens for contributing compute power to jointly train AI models. Huang endorsed this distributed training approach, viewing it as complementary to closed-source models.

That month, TAO surged from around $180 to above $332.

He praised the technological path, not the tokens. But moving from the CTO’s “useless” to the CEO’s nod, the crypto space through Nvidia’s lens had transformed: no longer a mob of GPU-grabbing miners, but a cohort leveraging compute for AI.

Miners Become Major Clients

Nvidia is changing, but miners are changing even faster.

The reason isn’t complicated: mining is becoming less profitable. CoinShares data shows that in Q4 2025, the weighted average cash cost for public mining companies to mine one Bitcoin was approximately $80,000.

Mines possess electricity, land, and server rooms—exactly what AI companies lack. By late March this year, signed AI and high-performance computing contracts among public Bitcoin mining firms totaled over $70 billion.

IREN has taken it the furthest. In November 2025, it signed a roughly $9.7 billion, five-year deal with Microsoft to supply compute power using Nvidia GB300 GPUs.

In May this year, it again inked a roughly $3.4 billion, five-year agreement with Nvidia to provide GPU cloud services for Nvidia’s internal AI and research teams at its Childress campus in Texas. As part of the same transaction, IREN granted Nvidia a warrant allowing it to purchase up to 30 million shares at $70 each within five years, totaling roughly $2.1 billion upon full exercise.

Eight years ago, miners competed with gamers for Nvidia’s GPUs. Now, a Bitcoin mining company flips the script, supplying compute to Nvidia, while Nvidia could potentially become its shareholder.

Their roles have completely reversed.

The upside is stable orders; the downside is that mining companies’ equipment, clients, and financing are now tightly coupled with Nvidia.

Scandal Weekend, Crypto Markets Open First

Then came this weekend.

On October 29, according to The New York Times, U.S. intelligence officials believe former Megaspeed executive Alice Huang, a close associate of Jensen Huang, has been transmitting information to Beijing.

The Chinese Embassy in the U.S. called it “baseless defamation,” while Singapore’s Ministry of Home Affairs stated the government has not investigated Alice Huang, though the Megaspeed case remains under investigation.

On Sunday, November 8, Nvidia’s board announced an independent investigation, while stating there was no reason to believe national security or company secrets were compromised. That same day, Jensen Huang posted a letter on the company website confessing to an extramarital affair: “There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry.”

Nasdaq wouldn’t open until Monday, but the crypto circle took the initial hit.

Hyperliquid offers a perpetual contract tracking Nvidia’s stock, tradable over weekends when U.S. equities are halted. Here is the timeline following the news:

3:03 PM ET: On-chain Nvidia contracts began spiking downward volume.

3:22 PM: Kalshi launched three new markets, including one on whether Jensen Huang will depart before January 1, 2027.

4:17 PM: Polymarket listed a market on whether Jensen Huang will announce his resignation or be dismissed before year-end.

In less than an hour and a half, all three markets went live.

On-chain trading suddenly heated up. Weekly volumes previously hovered around $500,000 per hour, but between 3 PM and 8 PM, hourly trades surged to roughly $24.5 million—a 40-fold increase.

Starting at 6:57 PM ET Sunday, the price stalled at $179.27 for exactly ten minutes. This was precisely 5% below the reference price, marking the regulatory minimum floor permitted for weekends. The price couldn’t dip further until the night session opened after 8 PM, restoring external quotes, which finally broke through the line.

As of the afternoon of November 9 Beijing Time, the probability of him stepping down before year-end stood at 15% on Polymarket, and 18% on Kalshi for departure before January 1, 2027.

These figures can be interpreted in two ways.

One reading is that Nvidia and the crypto space are now deeply intertwined: yesterday’s miners are today’s customers and compute providers, and when crises strike, on-chain assets are the first to price in the impact.

Another reading is that this is merely another celebrity-driven speculative cycle: the Polymarket market traded roughly $150,000, trivial against Nvidia’s multi-trillion-dollar market cap, and on-chain contracts independently priced the event for barely five hours.

U.S. markets open at 10:30 PM Beijing Time tonight, followed by Nvidia releasing its third-quarter earnings in the early hours of November 18. The timeline for the independent investigation remains undefined.

Eight years ago, crypto’s hangover made him walk back his words.

This time, it’s the crypto circle pricing him.

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