Cryptocurrency And Tech Titans Lose $1.02 Billion Amid DeepSeek Emergence

The cryptocurrency market and major tech leaders have collectively lost a staggering $1.02 trillion, driven by the emergence of Chinese AI startup Deepseek.

On Monday, the crypto market is reported to have suffered a massive $920 billion loss, with Bitcoin failing to sustain its anticipated $100,000 milestone. Experts attribute the crypto slump to a strong correlation between Bitcoin and tech stocks.

AI meme coin Fartcoin, saw the sharpest drop, tumbling 31%, according to data from CoinGecko. The broader AI crypto token market showed similar weakness, with Near Protocol down 10%, Internet Computer falling 7%, Render declining 14%, and Artificial Superintelligence Alliance dropping 10%.

Other major digital currencies such as Ethereum, XRP, Solana, and Dogecoin also saw significant declines, contributing to the overall market downturn.

DeepSeek’s Al Disruption Shakes Tech Giants

DeepSeek’s R1 model, launched on Friday, gained widespread attention for delivering performance comparable to its U.S. counterparts while requiring fewer resources and less computing power.

The emergence of the Chinese startup, intensified competition in the Al sector, triggering significant losses for major tech firms and industry leaders.

US tech stocks plummeted with Nvidia (NVDA) shedding over $600 billion from its market capitalization in the past 24 hours, with its stock price falling from $142.62 per share on Friday to $118.58 on Monday, according to Yahoo Finance data. Additionally, the S&P 500 wiped out over $1 trillion from its market cap, while the NASDAQ dipped 3% over the same period.

DeepSeek’s breakthrough raised concerns about Nvidia’s dominance in the Al chip market, as R1 demonstrated that high-end hardware may not be essential for building powerful Al models.

Major AI agents such as AIXBT plunged 18.5%, ai16z framework has fallen 24%, Virtuals AI agent creation platform dropped 14%, and GRIFFAIN declined 25% in the past 24 hours.

Billionaires and Tech Stocks Take a Hit

DeepSeek’s disruptive entry into the Al space also impacted the fortunes of some of the world’s wealthiest individuals. Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, Nvidia co-founder Jensen Huang, and others lost a combined $108 billion following Monday’s market slump.

Jensen Huang saw his net worth shrink by nearly 20% ($20.1 billion), while Larry Ellison’s fortune declined by $22.6 billion-12% of his total wealth, knocking him down from third wealthiest man to fifth, behind Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and LVMH luxury tycoon Bernard Arnault.

Other major losses included; Michael Dell (Dell Inc.) – $13 billion Changpeng “CZ” Zhao (Binance Holdings) – $12.1 billion.

The broader stock market also reacted negatively, with the Nasdaq Composite Index falling by 3.1% and the S&P 500 declining by 1.5% as investors reassessed the trajectory of Al-focused companies, According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, the tech sector alone accounted for a collective $94 billion loss- 85% of the index’s total decline.

DeepSeek emergence has sparked comments from Tech giants. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen on Friday described DeepSeek R1 as one of the most amazing and impressive breakthroughs he has ever seen. The company’s technical paper says DeepSeek trained it “via large-scale reinforcement learning, RL, without supervised fine-tuning, SFT, as a preliminary step.”

Also commenting, Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan wrote on social media that DeepSeek advancements will benefit the tech industry. “If training models get cheaper, faster, and easier, the demand for inference – actual real-world use of AI – will grow and accelerate even faster, which assures the supply of compute will be used,” he said.

With DeepSeek innovation reshaping market dynamics and investor sentiment, the coming weeks will be crucial in determining whether the financial landscape stabilizes or faces further disruptions.