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BREAKING: Bitcoin falls to 12-week low as Jensen Huang's exit from Nvidia rattles markets

Bitcoin took Thursday's Nvidia shock harder than Nvidia did, sliding to prices it hadn't seen since late August.

Jensen Huang resigned as Nvidia's CEO and left its board, effective immediately, days after the company opened an investigation into him, and CFO Colette Kress is stepping in as interim chief.

Nvidia's stock fell as much as 14% early on, then recovered most of it to finish down about 4%, while the Nasdaq slipped just 0.4%.

Bitcoin never got that bounce, finishing the US day about 4% lower near $71,500, and more than $750 million of crypto trades were forcibly closed, about $634 million of them bets on a rise.

The selling carried on into Asian trading on Friday, pushing Bitcoin below $70,000 and forcing out another $798 million of trades in four hours.

Interest rates did Bitcoin more damage on Thursday, and they kept climbing after Nvidia had steadied.

Cleveland Fed President Beth Hammack said inflation pressures are broadening and the Fed needs to tighten further, and markets now price a December hike at about 94%.

The 2-year yield, the one most sensitive to Fed moves, rose about 7 basis points by mid-morning, and the 10-year finished at 5.10%, up from just under 5% on Wednesday.

Dip buyers aren't showing up either, with US spot Bitcoin ETFs losing about $1.44 billion over the five trading days to Wednesday.

HashKey's Tim Sun puts the funds' average buying price near $81,000, which leaves many of their holders sitting on losses.

BitGo's Greg Cipolaro points out last week's bounce after the midterms pulled just $75 million into the funds, and notes that Bitcoin keeps falling with stocks without joining their recoveries.

Friday morning's US producer price report could take some heat out of rates…

Material Indicators' Keith Alan reckons a cool reading that lowers the odds of aggressive hikes could easily flip the picture bullish.

Nvidia is still the name on every headline, but Bitcoin is trading on the 10-year yield and on ETF buyers who've gone quiet. 🚀

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Chamath Palihapitiya watched Thursday's market for a little over an hour and decided it wasn't worth trying to call.

He's the founder of Social Capital, an early-stage investor and one of the loudest voices in tech finance.

Here's what he posted:

(Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger famously kept a "too hard" pile for any investment they couldn't confidently judge, and left everything in it alone.)

Chamath posted it at 10:47am New York time, with the market still digesting Jensen Huang's resignation from Nvidia.

Within the hour, the chair of the House Select Committee on China said Nvidia must now put national security first, and called on Congress to pass chip export controls in its year-end defence bill.

Chamath replied that government oversight of Nvidia would be a disaster, pointing to how Microsoft's stock suffered for years under its antitrust settlement with the Justice Department.

So the questions hanging over the AI trade right now are who runs its most important company and how much say Washington gets, on top of a Fed that markets expect to keep hiking.

None of those can be answered with a spreadsheet…

Stock traders aren't panicking, though, with the VIX (Wall Street's fear gauge, built from options prices) closing Thursday at just 18.7, well below the 28 it hit on November 5.

That's a market that can't make up its mind, and Bitcoin, down about 14% over the past month, is getting the same treatment.

Investors who can't price stocks rarely go looking for riskier bets in the meantime.

Until the Fed or Nvidia gives a straight answer, expect the big money to leave Bitcoin in the too-hard bucket too. 🪣

Today we'll be taking a look at the amount of wallets that hold at least some Bitcoin. (anything greater than 0)

This metric offers a bird's-eye view of user activity and adoption across the Bitcoin network.

But there's a slight catch…

One wallet does not equal one user. A user can have many wallets.

What matters here is the trend of the chart.

59,708,741 wallets now hold Bitcoin. That's 10,285 fewer than two weeks ago (59,719,026).

It's the count's first fall after two fortnights of gains, of 164,414 and then 36,240.

The drop is under two hundredths of a percent of the total, so the count is close to flat.

Over the past month it's still up 25,955, from 59,682,786.

It now sits 586,259 short of the 60,295,000 it reached in September.

For now, the number of Bitcoin wallets has stopped growing. 📉

Gemini sells UK and European operations to stablecoin payments firm KAST for under $10 million. Gemini had shut both businesses after cutting about 25% of its global staff in February, keeping only its US and Singapore arms.

BNY taps Figment to support staking on its digital asset custody platform. Asset managers and ETF issuers holding coins with the bank will be able to earn staking rewards, starting with ETH and then SOL.

Illinois Crypto Tax Draws Unlikely Alliance of DOJ, Banks and DeFi. The 0.2% tax hits a token's full value whenever an Illinois customer trades, transfers or stores it, and is paused until July 2027.

South Korea to permit crypto withdrawal freezes during hacking threats. Exchanges could pause deposits and withdrawals once a hack is suspected rather than confirmed, after GOPAX halted services over a threat last week.

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Because what would the crypto world be without its share of memes?

Trivia Answer: Cheap, temporary data space for layer-2 rollups 🥳

Dencun's EIP-4844 gave rollups a separate, cheaper lane for posting data. Blobs are deleted after about 18 days, so posting data that way costs rollups far less than normal calldata.

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