Author: Clow, Plain Blockchain

On Sunday afternoon, while the Nasdaq was still closed, Huang Renxun's scandal had already opened in the cryptocurrency circle.

The on-chain Nvidia contracts fell nearly 4% within an hour, and two prediction markets successively opened new betting on his resignation.

Huang Renxun has never been considered a part of the cryptocurrency world. But eight years ago, it was the cryptocurrency sector that caused Nvidia's stock price to drop by half in a single quarter.

This account has been calculated for nine years and is still not settled.

01, Supported by Miners for Two Years

During the earnings call in August 2017, Huang Renxun said: "Cryptocurrency and blockchain will always exist, and they will become very big."

Six months later, in an interview with Barron's, he reiterated: "Cryptocurrency is real, and it will not disappear."

He had the confidence to say this. During those two years, miners were the least picky buyers for Nvidia. In May 2018, CFO Colette Kress disclosed that the sales of crypto-specific products in that quarter reached $289 million.

Three months later, this number dropped to only $18 million.

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

Unsold graphics cards piled up in the channels. Nvidia expected to generate only $2.7 billion in revenue for the next quarter, while Wall Street initially expected $3.4 billion. Those who bought Nvidia at the end of September found that by Christmas, they were left with less than half, a decline of 54%, marking the lowest performance in the S&P 500 that quarter.

He was the one who said it would always be there, and he was also the one who called it a hangover, only nine months apart.

02, This Account is Still Not Settled

The stock price later rebounded, but the legal issues did not.

In May 2022, the SEC settled a score first. It determined that Nvidia had only highlighted the massive growth of its gaming business in its quarterly reports for two consecutive quarters in fiscal 2018 without mentioning that a significant portion of this growth came from mining. Nvidia paid a $5.5 million fine, neither admitting nor denying the charges.

For Nvidia, this fine was a small issue; the trouble lay with the investors.

In 2018, a group of investors sued Nvidia, claiming the company concealed over $1 billion in graphics card sales related to mining. This lawsuit spanned from Trump's first term into his second term.

The first trial was dismissed, and the second trial was reinstated, with Nvidia appealing all the way to the Supreme Court. In December 2024, the Supreme Court returned the case due to "improper acceptance," saying simply, without giving reasons.

This March, U.S. District Judge Haywood Gilliam approved the class action certification, including investors who bought Nvidia stock between August 2017 and November 2018. Nvidia requested a review from the Ninth Circuit Court, with organizations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce submitting amicus briefs in support, but it was still dismissed on May 26.

Certification does not equate to determining Nvidia's liability; the case is now in the evidence discovery phase, and there is no court date yet. The core accusation from the plaintiffs is that Nvidia claimed to primarily sell specialized mining cards to miners, when in reality nearly two-thirds were Nvidia's gaming graphics cards, namely the GeForce series.

In other words, the plaintiffs aim to prove that many "gamers" back then were actually miners.

Nvidia has never admitted to misleading investors. However, eight years later, how many mining cards were actually sold and to whom remains an unsetted account.

03, From Mining Restrictions to Praising Bittensor

Huang Renxun publicly says that cryptocurrency will always be around, while the company is pushing it away.

In February 2021, Nvidia placed a lock on the newly released GeForce RTX 3060: by using drivers to cut Ethereum mining efficiency in half and introducing a mining-specific CMP card for miners.

Matt Wuebbling, responsible for GeForce marketing, made it clear in a blog post: "We design GeForce for gamers." This means the gaming cards are reserved for players, while miners should buy CMP.

Ironically, a few weeks later, a developer driver released by Nvidia accidentally unlocked this lock, which the company subsequently acknowledged and fixed.

The CMP mining cards generated $550 million in sales during fiscal 2022, less than one-twenty-fourth of the gaming business's $12.4 billion during the same period. In September 2022, as Ethereum moved to proof of stake, there was no longer a need for graphics card mining, and that business came to an end.

Half a year later, Nvidia CTO Michael Kagan told The Guardian that cryptocurrency "has not brought anything useful to society, AI has."

This statement was made by the CTO, not Huang Renxun. At that time, ChatGPT was just gaining popularity, and Nvidia's graphics cards had changed hands to a new group of buyers.

A turning point occurred in March this year. During the GTC conference, Huang Renxun appeared on the All-In podcast, where host Chamath Palihapitiya mentioned Bittensor. This is a network that rewards everyone for contributing computing power to train AI models together using tokens. Huang Renxun endorsed this idea of distributed training, viewing it as complementary to closed-source models.

In that month, the TAO token jumped from around $180 to over $332.

He praised the technical direction without mentioning the token. But the shift from the CTO's "useless" to the CEO's nod indicates that the cryptocurrency sector, in Nvidia's view, has evolved: it is no longer a group of miners scrambling for graphics cards, but a crowd using computing power for AI.

04, Miners Became Major Customers

Nvidia is changing, and miners are changing even faster.

The reason is simple: mining is becoming increasingly unprofitable. CoinShares estimates that in the fourth quarter of 2025, the weighted average cash cost for publicly traded mining companies to mine a single Bitcoin will be about $80,000.

Mining facilities have electricity, land, and data centers, which AI companies happen to lack. As of the end of March this year, publicly traded Bitcoin mining companies had signed AI and high-performance computing contracts worth over $70 billion.

The furthest ahead is IREN. In November 2025, it signed a 5-year contract worth $9.7 billion with Microsoft to provide computing power using Nvidia's GB300 graphics cards.

In May this year, it signed another 5-year contract worth $3.4 billion with Nvidia to provide GPU cloud services for Nvidia's internal AI and research teams at the Childress facility in Texas. In the same deal, IREN also granted Nvidia a warrant: to purchase up to 30 million shares at $70 per share over five years, with a total exercise price of approximately $2.1 billion.

Eight years ago, miners were competing with gamers for Nvidia's graphics cards. Now, a Bitcoin mining company is supplying computing power to Nvidia, and Nvidia may even become its shareholder.

The roles have completely reversed.

The benefit is a stable stream of orders, while the cost is that the equipment, clients, and financing of mining companies are now more tightly linked to Nvidia.

05, Scandal Weekend, Cryptocurrency Circle Opened First

Then there was this weekend.

On October 29, according to The New York Times, U.S. intelligence officials believe that Alice Huang, a former executive of the Singapore company Megaspeed, has been relaying information to Beijing, and she has a close relationship with Huang Renxun.

The Chinese Embassy in the U.S. stated that this was "groundless smearing," while Singapore's Ministry of Home Affairs mentioned that the government has not investigated Alice Huang, but the Megaspeed case is still under investigation.

On Sunday, November 8, Nvidia's board announced an independent investigation while stating there was no reason to believe that national security or company secrets were compromised. On the same day, Huang Renxun publicly acknowledged an extramarital affair on the company's website: "There is no excuse for what I did, and I am deeply sorry."

The Nasdaq would not open until Monday, but the cryptocurrency circle had already begun trading.

There is a type of perpetual contract on Hyperliquid that tracks Nvidia's stock price, allowing trading during the weekend even when the U.S. stock market is closed. After the news broke, the timeline was as follows:

• At 3:03 PM Eastern Time, Nvidia began to drop significantly on-chain.
• At 3:22 PM, Kalshi created new markets such as "Huang Renxun resigns before January 1, 2027."
• At 4:17 PM, Polymarket listed "Will Huang Renxun announce his resignation or be dismissed before the end of the year?".

Within less than an hour and a half, all three markets opened.

On-chain trading suddenly heated up. Previously, the weekend trading volume was only about half a million dollars per hour, but from 3 PM to 8 PM, the trading volume reached about $24.5 million per hour, increasing by more than 40 times.

Starting from 6:57 PM Eastern Time on Sunday, the price remained at $179.27 for a full ten minutes, which was exactly 5% lower than the reference price, the minimum price allowed on weekends. It could not fall below this level. Only after 8 PM, when the night market opened and external quotes returned, did the price drop below this line.

As of the afternoon of November 9, Beijing time, the probability on Polymarket that he would resign before the end of the year was 15%, while on Kalshi, it was 18% for resigning before January 1, 2027.

These numbers can be interpreted in two ways.

One interpretation is that Nvidia and the cryptocurrency circle are deeply intertwined: the miners of yesteryear have become its clients and suppliers of computing power, and when it faces issues, the first to price it out is also the on-chain market.

The other interpretation is that this is just another round of speculation surrounding a celebrity: the market on Polymarket traded about $150,000, which is negligible compared to Nvidia's market cap of trillions of dollars, and the on-chain contracts were only priced for about five hours.

At 22:30 Beijing time tonight, U.S. stocks are set to open, with Nvidia scheduled to release its third-quarter earnings report on the morning of November 18, and the independent investigation does not yet have a timetable.

Eight years ago, the hangover from the cryptocurrency circle made him change his words.

This time, it is the cryptocurrency circle that is pricing him.

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