Crypto Earthquake
“The Kimi Moment” and how a free Chinese AI threatens the new empire of Bitcoin miners
Are we seeing a fracture in the investment thesis that links AI with the crypto ecosystem?
On Friday,
#bitcoin ,
#Ethereum and the major cryptocurrencies suffered sharp declines that echoed the slump in semiconductor stocks in Asia. The culprit was dubbed the “Kimi Moment”: the release of the Kimi K3 Artificial Intelligence model, developed by the Beijing startup Moonshot AI.
Brutal efficiency:
#K3 has 2.8 billion parameters, but it uses a “mixture of experts” architecture (activating only 16 of its 896 specialists per task), which makes it incredibly cheap to run.
Outperforming the giants: In frontend code tests, K3 managed to dethrone U.S. flagship and paid models, beating
#Claude Fable 5 (Anthropic) and GPT-5.6 (
#OpenAI )
The Real Threat: Open Source
What truly sparked panic in market valuations wasn’t just the model’s performance, but its license. Kimi K3 is open source and completely free (it will be released to the public on July 27).
Paradigm shift: The multi-billion-dollar investments in AI infrastructure were sustained on the premise that cutting-edge technology would be scarce, very costly, and controlled by the United States. A free, top-tier Chinese model completely destroys that argument.
3. The Crypto Impact: why does BTC fall?
The crypto ecosystem absorbed this blow not because of a blockchain problem, but for a fundamental reason that connects BTC with AI.
The miners’ crisis: Over the past two years, Bitcoin miners have pivoted their business model toward renting out their data centers for AI training and inference. If the industry turns toward free, highly efficient models that require fewer hardware resources, demand for miners’ servers collapses.
$BTC