The crypto booms
Miners bought GPUs by the pallet. Gamers couldn't buy them at all. And NVIDIA got caught in the middle — twice.
Boom #1: 2017
When cryptocurrency prices surged in 2017, miners discovered that NVIDIA’s gaming GPUs were excellent at mining Ethereum. Cards sold out; prices spiked; NVIDIA’s revenue jumped. The company was happy to sell chips — but uneasy about who was buying them. Mining demand was volatile: when crypto crashed in 2018, the used market flooded with ex-mining cards, undercutting new sales.
Boom #2: 2020–2021
The pandemic-era crypto mania was bigger. Ethereum mining drove unprecedented GPU demand just as supply chains seized up. Gamers — NVIDIA’s core customers — faced empty shelves and tripled prices, and their anger was loud.
NVIDIA’s response was awkward and revealing:
- CMP (Cryptocurrency Mining Processor) — a dedicated mining card line, trying to segment miners away from gamers.
- LHR (Lite Hash Rate) — 2021 gaming GPUs shipped with firmware limiting their mining performance, an attempt to make GeForce cards unattractive to miners.
- The driver “mistake” — NVIDIA accidentally released a driver that removed the LHR limiter, then confirmed it was a mistake. The episode became a symbol of the company’s conflicted position.
The SEC settlement (2022)
In May 2022, NVIDIA settled with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for $5.5 million, over charges that it had failed to adequately disclose how much of its gaming-revenue growth was driven by crypto mining. The SEC’s case: investors couldn’t assess the sustainability of the growth without knowing its source. NVIDIA settled without admitting or denying the findings — the standard formula.
This is the most documented blemish on Huang’s record, and this site includes it plainly: the company he runs as a paragon of focus got caught obscuring where its money came from.
What crypto taught NVIDIA
- Volatility is not a strategy. Mining revenue was huge and unreliable — the opposite of the data-center business Huang wanted.
- Segmentation is hard. CMP and LHR showed that once a general-purpose chip exists, controlling its use is nearly impossible.
- Disclosure matters. The SEC settlement is now a case study in crypto-era disclosure.
The aftermath
Ethereum’s 2022 “Merge” — switching from mining to staking — ended GPU mining almost overnight. The used-card flood came, then cleared. And by then, a much bigger demand wave had arrived: AI. The crypto era now reads as a rehearsal — the first time the world discovered it desperately needed NVIDIA’s chips, and the first time that need caused problems.
Source notes
Crypto-era history from contemporaneous press coverage (2017–2022), NVIDIA’s product announcements (CMP, LHR), and the SEC’s May 2022 settlement order ($5.5 million; settled without admission). Characterizations of gamer sentiment and the driver episode are reported in tech press coverage.