The violence (ARB) was set to make a splash.
The Layer 2 network, home to a growing number of decentralized AI platforms, prepared to advertise a milestone: It had been named Nvidia’s exclusive Ethereum partner to the chipmaker’s new ignition AI accelerator, an offshoot of its starting program that supports promising AI -Startups with infrastructure crashes.
Then came the pivot.
“We received some commands at the last minute from Nvidia who requested to pause the message, but they did not provide any specific details of why,” a spokesman Coindesk told in an email.
It is a narrative moment and a reminder that despite Crypto’s continued efforts to adapt to the flowering AI sector, Nvidia’s programs still explicitly excludes crypto-related projects. A quick look at the starting accelerator criteria (ignition is a replacement of it, given the start of the start -bath on its site) shows a clear disqualification: Cryptocurrency.
This attitude is not new, and while it can frustrate crypto developers who want to utilize Nvidia’s ecosystem, it reflects a longer history of distance and occasional difference from the company’s management.
Back in 2018, co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang described the fallen from the ICO boom as giving Nvidia a “crypto-timber.” Ethereum’s price collapse left the company saddle with unsold GPU warehouse, and Nvidia later paid a fine of $ 5.5 million over how it reported crypto-related revenue impact.
Years later, in a 2023 interview with The Guardian, Nvidia CTO was Michael Kagan more directly: “Crypto does not bring anything useful to the community,” he said, adding, “I never believed it [crypto] is something that will do something good for humanity, ”it contrasts to AI.
This skepticism has been in sharp contrast to Nvidia’s embrace of artificial intelligence and occasional tolerance of blockchain.
At the company’s 2024 graphics technology conference, Huang appeared on stage with Illia Polosukhin, co-author of attention, everything you need, the paper that introduced transformer models that are the basis of modern AI tools such as Chatgpt. While polosukhin also founded the almost blockchain, the discussion square on AI, not crypto.
The closest NIKK to the industry came when Huang, in characteristic wide strokes, said: “We got programmable people, we got programmable proteins, we got programmable money.” The remark, probably rhetorical, was not a signal of support for crypto despite the AI -Token pine, and in fact no strategic shift.
Although Nvidia has been aware of her position on crypto, some in the industry continue to interpret moments like these as cracks in the door, a potential softening that can eventually lead to inclusion. But with crypto, which is still formally excluded from Nvidia’s flagship programs, and the company refuses to comment on its current attitude, the door appears just as firmly closed.
Currently, Nvidia’s message seems ready: Crypto is not invited.
