Fake Nvidia, Hedera Partnership News Sends HBAR's Market Cap up $2B

Following what turned out to be fake news of a partnership between Hedera and Nvidia, HBAR — the native asset of the Hedera network and a top twenty cryptocurrency by market cap — experienced an over 30% price surge, with the price peaking today, April 8.

Starting yesterday, after dipping sharply to $0.126, the price of HBAR rallied to just over $0.16, while its market cap grew $2 billion, increasing from $5.3 billion to near $7 billion, according to CoinGecko data. HBAR has been trading sideways around $0.16 for the past week, before dipping and sharply rallying April 7-8.

The asset’s price rose after what turned out to be fake news of a partnership between enterprise-focused blockchain protocol Hedera and microchip giant Nvidia broke on LinkedIn. The asset's price has since dropped back down near $0.15, up about 1% over the past 24 hours.

HBAR’s price action started with an April 6 post from a now deleted LinkedIn account belonging to an Anthony Rong, who falsely claimed to be the Regional Vice President of Engineering at Nvidia. The post announced that the computer microprocessor manufacturing giant had partnered with Hedera to integrate the protocol in its AI systems.

Several crypto news outlets and X accounts picked up the news on April 7, which further amplified the effects on HBAR’s price, evidently causing it to rally to today’s high.

The LinkedIn account had very minimal posting history with only two prior posts and no verifiable affiliation with Nvidia. Per public records, no one with that name works at the company. Nvidia and Hedera’s official channels also have no recent information about a partnership together.

A real partnership with similar details and actually involving the two firms, alongside EQTY Lab and Intel, was announced in December of last year.