Jensen Huang was also a "Ethereum KOL."

Written by: Eric, Foresight News

In 2017, the cryptocurrency market was in a booming bull market.

Recently, Jensen Huang, who has dominated headlines around the world, stated during Nvidia's annual earnings call, "Cryptocurrency and blockchain will exist for a long time, and (the scale) will become very large... GPUs are well positioned in this regard."

According to Nvidia's historical financial data, until 2023, the revenue share from data centers in Nvidia's chip business only surpassed that of gaming for the first time. Before that, gaming graphics cards and professional visualization tools were Nvidia's main business, but during those years, the relatively low share of Ethereum mining had repeatedly disturbed Nvidia's stock price.

Ethereum Bear Market Caused Nvidia to Lose $20 Billion

In March 2018, Jensen Huang had just celebrated his 55th birthday. In an interview with CNBC's "Mad Money," he reiterated what he said in the previous year's earnings call: "Cryptocurrency will exist. The world will have a way of value exchange with very low friction and cost, and this way will exist for a long time."

He also stated, "Blockchain will exist for a long time; it will become a brand new form of foundational computing. I expect blockchain and cryptocurrency to become important driving forces for GPU development."

During those two years, the CEO of JPMorgan publicly called Bitcoin a fraud and stated he would fire employees trading Bitcoin; Warren Buffett also repeatedly stated that cryptocurrency would have a "bad ending"; AMD somewhat benefited from the mining business but cautiously stated that "mining will not be a long-term growth driver."

Looking back now, Jensen Huang could be considered a "small Musk."

In 2016 and 2017, thanks to the rapid growth of gaming and data center businesses, Nvidia's stock price rose by 224% and 81% respectively over the two years. But just as Huang was immersed in the surprises that cryptocurrency could bring him, a shock arrived first. In 2018, cryptocurrency prices collapsed across the board, with Bitcoin dropping from nearly $20,000 to less than $4,000, and Ethereum even falling from four digits back to two digits.

In August 2018, Nvidia announced its mid-term financial report, revealing that revenue from cryptocurrency-related products plummeted from $289 million in the previous quarter to only $18 million. The company clearly stated that the contribution from cryptocurrency in the second half of the year could be ignored, and Nvidia's stock price fell about 5% after hours. In November of the same year, Nvidia released its Q3 financial report, with revenue falling short of expectations, and more critically, it provided guidance for the next quarter that was significantly below Wall Street expectations ($2.7 billion vs. expected $3.4 billion). Huang explicitly attributed the reason to a "crypto hangover" that was longer and more severe than expected.

The day after this financial report was released, Nvidia's stock price dropped about 19% from the previous day's close. A mining business that accounted for only a single-digit percentage of total revenue caused Nvidia's market value to evaporate by more than $20 billion in one day.

From "Becoming the Past" to "Dedicated Mining Machines"

In March 2019, Jensen Huang attempted to completely distance Nvidia from cryptocurrency at a press conference in Tel Aviv, Israel. He stated to the media that Nvidia "never made plans for cryptocurrency; cryptocurrency found us, and it has become the past." He acknowledged that cryptocurrency technology has its value to some extent and even hoped that the blockchain world could find algorithms with lower computational intensity in the future, so that GPUs would no longer be a must-have for miners.

Clearly, Huang was significantly hurt by the ups and downs of cryptocurrency. But just two years later, the situation turned around again.

In the second half of 2020, Ethereum's price soared, and Nvidia's gaming graphics cards once again became hard currency in the eyes of miners. The RTX 30 series was in high demand, and players complained of being squeezed out of the market. News of internet cafes being entirely taken over for mining purposes was common. However, due to the previous bear market, miners struggled to find stable supply channels, leading to skyrocketing retail prices and long-term shortages on e-commerce platforms. Gamers either had no graphics cards to use or ended up buying "mining cards" that had been "picked clean." Social media was filled with anger towards Nvidia.

Jensen Huang realized that simply pretending cryptocurrency did not exist could no longer solve the problem. In February 2021, Nvidia officially launched the Cryptocurrency Mining Processor, or CMP series. This was a set of devices designed specifically for professional mining, without display outputs, optimized for airflow, and supporting high-density multi-card deployment.

This was perhaps not Huang reconciling with cryptocurrency but rather hoping that the main business would not be affected. The evidence is that Nvidia imposed driver-level restrictions on the RTX 3060, roughly halving its Ethereum mining power through the LHR mechanism, attempting to physically separate gamers and miners into two channels.

At that time, Huang's orders could make the Ethereum mining community tremble. Although Bitmain also had Ethereum mining machines and AMD's graphics cards had even higher mining efficiency, Nvidia's machines were always the first choice in terms of supply and product stability.

The market initially reacted enthusiastically to CMP. In the first quarter of fiscal year 2021, CMP series revenue exceeded $155 million. Nvidia optimistically expected revenue to reach $400 million in the next quarter, but the actual situation did not fully meet this ambition, with second-quarter revenue around $266 million. By the third quarter, this number fell to $105 million.

Cumulatively, CMP brought Nvidia about $526 million in revenue over the entire cycle, with Canadian mining company Hut 8 placing an order for $30 million worth of CMP equipment. Later, Nvidia even launched a higher-end CMP 170HX, with an Ethereum hash rate of about 164 MH/s, priced over $4,000, but with very limited supply, more like an experimental product aimed at top mining farms.

With the launch of dedicated mining machines, Huang's attitude towards cryptocurrency underwent a 180-degree turn again. During Computex 2021, in an interview with VentureBeat, when asked if he was excited about Ethereum's transition to proof of stake, he gave an affirmative answer. In his view, Ethereum had established its position, possessing reliability and credibility, with many applications like DeFi relying on its network, so the shift to PoS was a natural upgrade.

He believed Ethereum had high long-term value, with transaction processing speeds expected to increase significantly, and he did not hide the fact that cryptocurrency would continue to exist. He also stated that Ethereum's current popularity might cool down in a year, but the act of crypto mining itself would not disappear. Additionally, he believed that the reason Ethereum chose GPUs was that GPUs constituted the world's largest programmable distributed supercomputer network.

In September 2022, the Ethereum merge that excited Huang was completed, and the demand for GPU mining collapsed overnight. Global mining farms shut down, a massive influx of second-hand graphics cards flooded the market, and the previously hard-to-find situation instantly reversed into inventory backlog. Nvidia's Chief Financial Officer had to admit in subsequent financial reports that the Ethereum merge had a negative impact on the demand for some products.

However, starting in 2022, the data center business began to gradually become the core of Nvidia, and the discontinuation of mining products did not have a significant impact on Nvidia. It was also after this that Nvidia officially parted ways with cryptocurrency.

AI and Crypto

If Huang does not encounter any issues, we might see a third reversal in the future.

Payments based on x402 and stablecoins are recognized as the best solution for Agent payments currently, and "AI + Crypto" projects now hold a place in the Web3 market. In March of this year, at the NVIDIA GTC 2026 conference, All-In Podcast host Chamath Palihapitiya asked Huang about his views on Bittensor training low-parameter large models through distributed computing power, to which Huang responded that this is a modern version of "Folding@home," and stated that open-source/decentralized models and closed-source models are in a complementary relationship.

Huang's endorsement caused the TAO token to surge over 20% temporarily, with many people on X expressing surprise that Huang himself inadvertently promoted a crypto project.

With the continuous development of AI, stablecoins or other cryptocurrencies may indeed become the currency for transactions between agents in the silicon-based era. Originally, Huang could have continued to elaborate on this topic, but even if there is an opportunity to discuss it again in the future, it is highly likely that he will no longer be in the position of Nvidia CEO, nor will he be standing on the stage built by Nvidia.