Good morning!

Markets are jittery again today, and we're digging deeper than usual into both the Nvidia story and bitcoin's slide — because right now, cause and effect are genuinely hard to untangle.

The Nvidia story has moved fast: what started as reporting on Jensen Huang's affairs has shifted toward harder questions — how a little-known Singapore-based firm landed such outsized deals with Nvidia, and whether the leaks involved go so far as to breach US export rules on China.

Bitcoin's slide, meanwhile, has no single explanation: analysts point variously to rising rates, the US midterm results stalling crypto legislation, ETF outflows, forced liquidations on leveraged shorts, and plain technical breakdowns. And in a closing piece today, we look at whether the rest of crypto — altcoins — might be starting to decouple from bitcoin altogether.

Given that, we're skipping our usual "Why it matters" on most of today's stories — the honest answer right now is that it depends on which explanation you believe, and that will likely get clearer as the dust settles. We're sharing close to 20 stories today because we think they're all relevant; judging how each one actually plays out is partly up to you.

— Morten

Nvidia's market cap fell from $4.498 trillion a week earlier to $4.005 trillion Thursday — a roughly $490 billion drop — as reports of CEO Jensen Huang's affairs widened into a company crisis. The stock closed at $166.19, down 4.34%, even as it rose slightly after hours. Apple's market cap, by comparison, stands at $5.16 trillion.

Source: Nvidia market cap plunges $490 billion following former CEO Huang's affair scandals — Yahoo Finance

Nvidia shares are down 11% this week and headed for a sixth straight weekly decline — the longest losing streak since 2012. The chip giant has lost roughly $1.6 trillion in market cap since early October and has fallen below Apple in total value.

Source: Nvidia on track for longest weekly losing streak since 2012 as market value sinks by $1.6 trillion — CNBC

Jensen Huang has resigned as president, CEO and board member, effective immediately. CFO Colette Kress becomes interim CEO while keeping her finance role, and Harvey C. Jones, former Synopsys chief, becomes Nvidia's first-ever board chair. The board says it has "full confidence in Colette" and expects no interruption to operations. Nvidia still reports Q3 results on November 17.

Source: NVIDIA Announces CEO Transition — NVIDIA (press release)

Kress, a 30-year industry veteran with stints at Cisco and Microsoft, has "fronted every earnings call" alongside Huang, says eToro analyst Josh Gilbert, calling her a trusted voice at a moment the market badly needs one. Whether she keeps the role long-term is less certain — Nvidia may instead want an engineer in the chair.

Source: Who is Nvidia's interim CEO Colette Kress — and who could take over permanently? — BBC

Nvidia shares fell 14% at the open, erasing more than $500 billion in value and dropping the company to third place by market cap. Reactions ranged widely: Binance's CZ called the ouster a mistake, Erik Voorhees dismissed the spy allegations as evidence-free, Tim Sweeney called it a sad day, and Elon Musk said hiring Huang would be an honor.

Source: "A Massive Mistake": Tech, AI and Crypto Founders React to Jensen Huang's Nvidia Exit — Decrypt

Rivals Broadcom, Intel and AMD rose Thursday on hopes customers diversify away from Nvidia, while CoreWeave — in which Nvidia holds a near-13% stake — fell nearly 7%. One analyst called Nvidia's practice of financing its own customers "incestuous," warning buyers may now want backup suppliers. Others say Huang's exit lands just as markets were already questioning whether AI spending is sustainable.

Source: Fallout from the Nvidia scandal may dampen the exuberance around the AI boom — AP/Yahoo Finance

Huang was, by one analysis, AI's most effective advocate across five fronts at once: shielding the industry politically, championing open-weight models, leading a 100-company push for AI self-regulation, countering "doomer" narratives about AI, and selling Nvidia's financing and AI-PC strategy to Wall Street. The piece argues no successor has stepped up with the same influence on any of them.

Source: Five ways Jensen Huang's ouster from Nvidia could damage the AI industry — TechCrunch (analysis)

Executives queued up to stress how central Huang had become: former Cisco CEO John Chambers called crisis response decisive for a company's future, Michael Dell called him a "visionary of the AI age," and Deutsche Telekom's Tim Höttges said a photo with Huang generated more coverage than his own iPhone launch. Huang had also joined Trump's China trip in May and gathered six major Wall Street names behind a $500 billion AI buildout plan in August.

Source: Jensen Huang's exit from Nvidia raises critical questions about the future of AI — CNBC

An analysis of publicly released model weights found numerical patterns consistent with Nvidia's export-restricted Blackwell chips in six AI models from four Chinese firms, including DeepSeek and Ant Group. The findings are technical evidence of possible access to advanced US processors, though they don't establish where the hardware was located or whether export rules were actually broken.

Source: The mystery of 445 rows: Nvidia Blackwell chip traces found in 6 Chinese AI models including DeepSeek, Ant Group — Moneycontrol

Jensen Huang called Colette Kress "a deer in the headlights" during an internal clash this summer over Nvidia's financing deals with AI customers, the Wall Street Journal reports. Kress had pushed for more caution and clarity around what critics call "circular financing" — Nvidia investing in firms that then buy its own chips — while Huang pushed back hard against internal resistance to his sales strategy.

Source: Before His Ouster, Jensen Huang Belittled the Executive Replacing Him — The Wall Street Journal

House Speaker Mike Johnson says there's a "developing consensus" in Congress for tougher limits on chip exports to China following Huang's resignation. Republicans are reportedly pushing to attach new export restrictions to this year's defense authorization bill — a must-pass measure that typically draws bipartisan support.

Source: Calls for crackdown on China chip exports – as it happened — The Guardian

Senators from both parties — including Elizabeth Warren, John Kennedy and Thom Tillis — want Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to answer for reportedly delayed action against chip smuggling, after the New York Times reported his department never acted against Singapore-based Megaspeed, the firm at the center of the Huang affair. The White House says Trump retains "complete confidence" in Lutnick.

Source: Howard Lutnick under scrutiny as Nvidia crisis widens — The National

Bitcoin dipped below $70,000 — down nearly 20% from about $86,000 a month ago — after breaking its 200-day moving average near $73,000, with no visible support below. Drivers cited include Nvidia's turmoil, hot US inflation data, continued ETF outflows and a reported $100 billion Anthropic IPO pulling funds from risk assets.

Source: Bitcoin Falls Below $70,000, No Buyers After Breaking 200-Day Moving Average — BiGGo

Bitcoin fell to around $69,000, its lowest since August, as the Dollar Index hit its highest level since April 2025 on rising bets for a December Fed rate hike. Iran's Revolutionary Guard claimed to have destroyed a US radar in Bahrain the same day. Exchanges liquidated more than $1.3 billion in crypto futures over 24 hours.

Source: Bitcoin dips below $70,000 as Dollar Index hits 19-month high — CoinDesk

Bitcoin's 50-day and 200-day moving averages are converging toward a bearish "death cross," with the RSI deep in oversold territory around 26. Technicians see $70,505 as the key support level, with a break opening the door to $67,292 and then $62,345.

Source: Bitcoin slips below $70,000 for the first time since August — FXStreet

The Democratic sweep in this month's US midterms has weakened the near-term outlook for the CLARITY Act, which would classify certain digital assets as commodities, one analyst argues. Combined with hot inflation data, that's added a political layer to bitcoin's fifth straight week of ETF outflows, which totaled roughly $1.28 billion.

Source: Bitcoin Selloff Deepens as Midterm Sweep Stalls Crypto Bill — StoneX (analysis, produced by a StoneX affiliate)

Beyond the shared sell-off, Nvidia's turmoil touches crypto directly through the AI-hosting businesses that former bitcoin miners have built on its chips. Core Scientific reported $215.4 million in third-quarter colocation revenue, and IREN runs a multiyear Microsoft deployment on Nvidia's GB300 systems — meaning delivery schedules and financing terms, not just stock moves, are what will actually show the damage.

Source: Nvidia's Jensen Huang crisis reaches crypto through more than Bitcoin — crypto.news

MSCI formally removed Strategy (MSTR) and Japan's Metaplanet from its indexes this week, judging them "non-operating" companies — pushing MSTR to a near three-month low. Strategy disputes the classification and says index funds hold just 3.1% of its shares. The bigger question now is whether Nasdaq 100 follows, where JPMorgan once estimated $8.8 billion of Strategy's value sat in passive funds.

Source: Strategy Sinks As MSCI Axes Bitcoin Whale; Is Nasdaq 100 Next? — Investor's Business Daily

Correlations between crypto sectors have fallen in recent years, and returns increasingly vary in ways bitcoin's own price doesn't explain, according to Grayscale's research team. Their conclusion: holding bitcoin alone is an increasingly incomplete way to access the asset class, and investors may want to look at sector and asset selection, not just price direction.

Source: Beyond Bitcoin: Crypto's Growth Creates More Ways to Invest — Grayscale (analysis)

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Wishing you a great Friday — see you Sunday for the Kaupr Digest, and back Monday morning for the next edition of Kaupr Daily.

Best regards
Morten Myrstad
Founder & Editor