Jensen Huang's crypto world past: from "crypto hangover" to on-chain listing

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s personal scandal broke over a Nasdaq-closed weekend, and on-chain markets priced it first: Hyperliquid’s Nvidia-tracking perpetual futures fell nearly 4% in an hour, while Kalshi and Polymarket launched markets on whether Huang will leave before January 1, 2027, or by year-end; weekend on-chain volume jumped from roughly $500,000 to about $24.5 million per hour between 3 p.m. and 8 p.m. ET, a more than 40-fold increase. The episode revives Nvidia’s nine-year crypto entanglement: crypto-specific product sales hit $289 million in the May 2018 quarter before collapsing to $18 million three months later, and Nvidia’s stock fell 54% from late September to Christmas 2018 as the “crypto hangover” hit. The SEC fined Nvidia $5.5 million in 2022 for not flagging mining-driven gaming revenue, and in March a California federal judge certified a class action covering investors who bought from August 2017 to November 2018, alleging nearly two-thirds of cards sold to miners were GeForce gaming GPUs; the case is now in discovery with no trial date. Nvidia’s stance has shifted from locking RTX 3060 Ethereum mining in 2021 and CTO Michael Kagan saying crypto “doesn’t bring anything useful” to Huang endorsing Bittensor’s distributed AI training in March, when TAO rose from about $180 to over $332. Meanwhile miners have become customers: listed Bitcoin miners have signed over $70 billion in AI and HPC contracts, including IREN’s roughly $9.7 billion, five-year Microsoft deal and a roughly $3.4 billion, five-year GPU cloud contract with Nvidia that includes warrants for up to 30 million shares at $70. Watch whether Nvidia’s board investigation contains the