How Graphics Card Prices Spiraled: Mining, Scalpers, and Prices No One Could Believe

At the height of the shortage, graphics cards with an MSRP of $500 were selling for 3 times as much — if they could be found in stores at all. Over the past 10 years, the market has endured 2 major waves of price increases during which official prices almost completely lost touch with reality. Here is how graphics card prices changed, what caused the sudden spikes, and why MSRP is no longer a reliable benchmark.

To understand the scale of the madness that followed, it helps to remember what the market looked like before the mining booms. Launch shortages happened back then as well: in 2016, the GTX 1080 was initially available only as a $699 Founders Edition, while the GTX 1070 remained almost impossible to find for weeks. Within a couple of months, however, supply normalized, and MSRP once again became a realistic benchmark. The GTX 1080 cost $599, the GTX 1070 cost $379, and the GTX 1060 cost $249. You could walk into a store, pay roughly the advertised price, and leave with a graphics card.

A new generation arrived every couple of years, older models became cheaper, and upgrading was routine. MSRP actually meant something: retail markups were modest, while Founders Edition cards cost an extra $50–100 for NVIDIA's reference design. That was it. There were no lotteries, bots, or scalpers waiting outside stores. This “normal” era provides the baseline. The market would soon break twice.

First, a quick explanation. Cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum were produced through mining: computers raced to solve mathematical problems, and the network rewarded successful solutions with coins. Graphics cards were ideal for the task for a reason. Their thousands of parallel processing cores, normally used to render pixels in games, were equally good at testing possible solutions. As long as Ethereum's algorithm could be processed on GPUs, every gaming graphics card was effectively a small money-printing farm — leaving gamers to compete for hardware with people who used it to generate income.

The first wave (2017–2018). The first major boom coincided with Ethereum's rise from around $8 at the beginning of 2017 to its then-record high of approximately $1430 in mid-January 2018. Miners bought up the mid-range segment because the GTX 1060 and GTX 1070, along with the Radeon RX 570 and RX 580, offered the best performance for the money. The result was predictable: cards in the GTX 1060/1070 class sold for twice their recommended prices, RX 570/580 models cost 3 times their MSRP, and some GTX 1070 cards reached approximately $1300.

Then the bubble burst. By December 2018, Ethereum had collapsed to around $83 — a 94% drop from its January peak. Miners flooded the secondhand market with graphics cards, while NVIDIA was left with warehouses full of unsold chips. Jensen Huang called it a “crypto hangover,” and NVIDIA's stock lost around a third of its value over the course of 2018. The SEC later put a final footnote on the episode: in May 2022, the regulator fined NVIDIA $5.5 million for failing to disclose to investors how much cryptocurrency mining had boosted its “gaming” revenue in 2017–2018.

The second wave (2020–2021). The first wave could have been dismissed as a freak event. The second became a catastrophe because 3 separate problems converged. First, a global shortage of semiconductors and other components, combined with pandemic-related logistics disruptions, left factories unable to keep up and extended production cycles — something NVIDIA explicitly acknowledged in its reports. Second, the shift to remote work caused demand for home PCs to explode. Third, Ethereum began another surge, eventually reaching its all-time high of $4878 on November 10, 2021. Supply was limited, while demand from both gamers and miners was breaking records. The scale at which graphics cards disappeared from the market was unprecedented: according to a model from Jon Peddie Research, miners and speculators acquired around 700,000 mid-range and high-end discrete graphics cards worth approximately $500 million in the first quarter of 2021 alone — roughly a quarter of quarterly AIB graphics card shipments. Cards did not remain on store shelves for even a single day.

Shortages combined with overwhelming demand introduced a third player: the scalper. The RTX 30 series launch in September 2020 provided a perfect example. Online retailers sold out within seconds, and a significant share of the stock went not to gamers or even miners, but to automated bots capable of placing orders faster than any person. The same cards then resurfaced on eBay with prices marked up by 2–3 times. According to analyst Michael Driscoll, approximately 49500 RTX 30 series cards were resold through eBay and StockX alone in early 2021, generating $61.5 million in revenue and an estimated $15 million in profit for scalpers.

NVIDIA attempted to keep graphics cards away from miners through technical restrictions. It released LHR (Lite Hash Rate) versions with their mining performance reduced by half through software, hoping to make the cards less attractive to mining farms and leave more stock for gamers. The measure did not last long: miners initially bypassed the restriction in part, and by May 2022, they had almost completely defeated it. Prices remained astronomical.

The only relief in the middle of the cycle came from an unexpected source — China. In May and June 2021, the Chinese authorities began a major crackdown on cryptocurrency mining. On May 21, the State Council called for authorities to “crack down on Bitcoin mining and trading,” and on June 18, Sichuan province ordered mining farms to shut down. Graphics card prices in China itself fell by almost 45%, while RTX 30 series cards became 12–19% cheaper worldwide during June and July. The global decline, however, was caused less by the ban itself than by the broader cryptocurrency downturn, falling profitability of GPU mining, and improving supply. Either way, this was only a dip in the middle of the cycle: by the end of 2021, prices were climbing again. The real crash was still ahead.

On September 15, 2022, at approximately 06:43 UTC, Ethereum completed The Merge — its transition from Proof-of-Work, or mining, to Proof-of-Stake, or staking. In simple terms, coins had previously been “mined” through calculations performed by graphics cards. Under the new system, the right to validate transactions went to users who locked their coins into the network. Ethereum's energy consumption fell by approximately 99.95%, and GPU mining of Ether disappeared with it. One of the largest sources of non-gaming demand for graphics cards ceased to be a factor: mining Ether on GPUs became impossible, and farms shut down. Other cryptocurrencies continued to be mined on graphics cards, but not at anything close to the same scale.

It is worth noting that prices had begun falling long before The Merge. Throughout 2022, they were pushed down by the crypto winter, recovering supply, and anticipation of new GPU generations. By July, the RTX 3070 cost around $530 against its $500 MSRP, while some Radeon cards had fallen below their recommended prices. The figures show the trend clearly: by the end of June 2022, before The Merge, graphics card prices had already dropped by approximately 57% compared with January, according to Tom's Hardware. The Merge was not the trigger but the final step: it permanently eliminated Ether mining on graphics cards and placed additional pressure on the secondhand market. Miners continued selling their hardware, although there was no immediate flood of used cards. By the fall, the RTX 3080 cost around $740 — close to its $699 MSRP. For the first time in 2 years, buyers could once again purchase a graphics card at a reasonable price without a struggle.

While prices were swinging wildly, the balance of power in the market was also changing. According to Jon Peddie Research, NVIDIA's share of desktop graphics card shipments increased from approximately 69% in Q4 2019 to a record 94% by the end of 2025. Over the same period, AMD's share fell from around 31% to approximately 5%. Intel did not enter the market until 2022 with its Arc lineup and currently holds around 1%.

The less competition there is, the more freedom the market leader has to set prices. At this point, there is almost no one left to keep them in check.

The relief that followed The Merge did not last long. In 2025–2026, graphics cards once again became luxury products, with retailers asking as much as $5,000 for an RTX 5090 that carries a $1999 MSRP. This time, however, the cause is different. Miners and scalpers are no longer the main problem. Instead, the artificial intelligence boom has created a memory shortage. That is a separate story covered in our article Why Graphics Cards Are So Expensive in 2026: How AI Ate the Memory Supply.

Over the past 10 years, the graphics card market has endured 2 waves of cryptocurrency mining demand and is now facing a new crisis driven by the expansion of AI infrastructure. Prices briefly returned close to MSRP between these periods, but the relief did not last. Official prices once again say little about what buyers will actually pay, with some models selling at retail for several times their recommended price. Judging by current forecasts, the situation is unlikely to change quickly.

Anyone choosing a graphics card today should consult our guide Which Graphics Card to Buy in Spring 2026. In a separate column, we also examined why now is the time to upgrade your PC or buy a console.

The same pattern occurred twice: demand from non-gamers suddenly surged, while supply could not keep up. From 2017 to 2021, cryptocurrency miners bought graphics cards in enormous quantities, causing prices to rise by 2–3 times. Later, in 2025–2026, the AI boom created a new shortage — although that is a separate story.

Graphics cards are good at processing not only graphics but also cryptocurrency calculations — at least while Ethereum used an algorithm that could run on GPUs. Miners bought thousands of cards to generate income, placing them in direct competition with gamers. At the peak in the first quarter of 2021, miners and speculators acquired around a quarter of quarterly mid-range and high-end AIB graphics card shipments, according to a JPR model.

On September 15, 2022, Ethereum switched from mining, or Proof-of-Work, to staking, or Proof-of-Stake, making it impossible to mine Ether on graphics cards. Prices had already been falling throughout 2022 because of the crypto winter and recovering supply. The Merge served as the final step: it eliminated GPU mining of Ether and placed additional pressure on the secondhand market.

Scalpers are resellers who buy products during shortages and sell them at a markup. In 2020–2021, they used bots to place orders faster than human buyers, bought entire graphics card shipments within seconds, and resold the cards on eBay for 2–3 times their recommended prices.

The cause has changed. Memory is now in short supply: chip manufacturers have redirected production capacity toward AI data centers, causing video memory prices to surge. The issue is covered in detail in a separate article Why Graphics Cards Are So Expensive in 2026: How AI Ate the Memory Supply.