Ethereum ends mining, EVGA exits GPU market

THE PC LANDSCAPE IS ABOUT TO see the biggest upheaval in years. AMD Zen 4 CPUs, Intel Raptor Lake, Nvidia Ada Lovelace, and AMD RDNA 3 are all here or coming soon. But perhaps just as big and impactful on the PC enthusiast community is the successful transition of Ethereum from proof of work mining to proof of stake minting—the very next day, EVGA announced that it would be closing down its graphics card division.

- Jarred Walton

Let that sink in. EVGA, the biggest vendor of Nvidia graphics cards in the US—accounting for roughly 40 percent of the market—called it quits one day after mining ended. The two might be unrelated. Nvidia’s CEO stated that EVGA’s founder Andrew Han had been “thinking about moving on for several years”. The time has apparently arrived and Han says he has no plans to sell the company or make cards for other companies. On the other, we can’t help but think cryptocurrency played a role.

This boom-and-bust cycle was the fourth since Bitcoin’s inception and, in many ways, the most impactful on the world markets. Cryptocurrencies reached a peak market cap of nearly $3 trillion in November 2021, but their total worth currently sits at less than $1 trillion. Numerous startups have come and gone, taking investor dollars with them.