NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards have tumbled by as much as 50% in secondhand markets, according to a report shared by Bloomberg that offers some insight into what happens in the midst of a cryptocurrency bear market. Charts sourced by the publication and MarkSight indicate a significant decline in pricing since the end of April, with the selling price of NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 3080 graphics cards now averaging between $800 and $600 on eBay—a significant difference from the exorbitant prices that they were being listed for by scalpers and other unscrupulous vendors during the peak of the crypto craze last year. Enthusiasts have been urging one another not to buy these cards for various reasons, including damages stemming from extensive mining work, and simple spite.
“People don’t want to buy GPUs knowing it’s potentially going to be obsolete in two quarters,” said Tristan Gerra, an analyst with Robert W. Baird & Co. “We believe that crypto-related purchases have steadily declined.”
“The reduced pace of increase in Ethereum network cash rate likely reflects lower mining activity on GPUs,” Colette Kress, NVIDIA’s Chief Financial Officer, said during the company’s quarterly conference call last month. “We expect a diminishing contribution going forward.”
Crypto miners discovered that gaming gear designed to play Assassin’s Creed or Red Dead Redemption in high resolution could also be harnessed to create new crypto tokens, and that set off a stampede to acquire the equipment.
An Nvidia graphics card with a list price of $1,499 was fetching twice that amount from frenzied buyers. Pierre Ferragu, an analyst at New Street Research, reports that $3 billion worth of graphics cards were bought by miners since the beginning of 2021 and “they are now flushing into the secondhand market.”
Source: Bloomberg