Artificial intelligence-linked cryptocurrencies surged on Monday, extending gains fueled by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's keynote at the company's GTC developer conference. Huang laid out Nvidia's vision for the next phase of AI infrastructure, emphasizing the rise of agentic AI systems and projecting roughly $1 trillion in chip demand backlog through 2027, with hyperscale cloud providers accounting for about 60% of its business.
The market responded positively to the bullish outlook. Among the notable movers was the AI-focused blockchain NEAR, which climbed more than 10% over 24 hours to reach its strongest level since late January. The FET token from the decentralized AI project Artificial Superintelligence Alliance surged as much as 20% intraday before paring gains. WLD, the identity-focused crypto project co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, rose about 10%, trading near $0.40. GRASS, a decentralized network for monetizing unused internet bandwidth to train AI models, jumped 13% to fresh 2026 highs.
Huang highlighted the viral OpenClaw project and announced Nvidia's enterprise-ready adaptation called NemoClaw, designed to make autonomous AI agents safer for corporate use. While Huang did not directly reference cryptocurrency, the sector is betting heavily on the convergence of AI and blockchain. A growing number of projects are positioning crypto rails as essential for the next wave of autonomous AI agents to transact and coordinate, while others are building decentralized networks for computing power and AI training as an alternative to centralized platforms.
Nvidia's stock (NVDA), a bellwether for the AI sector, initially jumped about 2% during the keynote before closing roughly 1.5% higher for the day.
