On-chain perpetual futures for Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) pointed to another drop as markets opened on November 9, with the stock aggressively shorted on HIP-3 after more than a day of concentrated selling volume.

NVDA rose among the most aggressively traded perpetual futures following news that founder Jensen Huang had an affair with Alice Huang, who is now under investigation for spying on behalf of China, as Cryptopolitan reported.

With official markets closed, perpetual futures — derivative contracts with no expiry date that track an underlying price around the clock — offered a preview of how Nasdaq could react when Monday trading began. NVDA traded at $186.64 during pre-market hours, down from its range above $200. The stock now faces double pressure from the immediate scandal, as well as the general deflation of AI and semiconductor stocks, a sector in which Nvidia is the leading supplier of AI data-center chips.

Weekend perpetual futures activity was watched as a signal of whether Nasdaq would react further to the potential removal of Huang as Nvidia's CEO. For now, Polymarket bets assign the event only a 24% probability by the end of 2026, with prediction-market odds that shift as new information reaches traders.

Swimmer Finance, one of the decentralized venues for trading tokenized equities, announced it would continue listing NVDA despite the recent outsized price volatility.

NVDA is also expected to react to a November 11 Congress hearing, followed by Q3 earnings on November 17 and another closed-door Congress hearing on November 18 — a cluster of scheduled events that keeps the stock surrounded by near-term catalysts through the week.

Hyperliquid Reaction Points to Further Price Drop

On Hyperliquid, the xyz:NVDA perpetual futures pair against USDC pushed the price down into the $178 range, with local lows at $175. The ticker recorded its most active selling volume of the past month, before bouncing as buying volumes returned once the price bottomed at $175.

As of November 9, the NVDA perpetual futures carried around $128M in open interest — the total value of still-open derivative positions — relatively small compared with other equity or commodity contracts. Despite this, the ticker ranked among the top 10 most traded contracts, standing just behind SanDisk (SNDK) in open interest.

Perpetual futures on HIP-3 — Hyperliquid's framework for deploying decentralized perpetual markets — use Pyth oracle pricing, drawing on an oracle network that streams real-time market data on-chain. Trading volumes jumped immediately. The usual range of $3.1M per hour spiked, with $115M an hour traded directly after the investigation news on Jensen Huang. The contracts enabled NVDA price discovery over the weekend, even while official markets remained closed.

Based on HIP-3 trading, NVDA may see further turbulence. As of November 9, the NVDA price sits around 6% lower than one year ago, entirely erasing the previous peak in semiconductor stock activity.

Whale Opens Aggressive Short on Hyperliquid

Following the news of Jensen Huang's affair, a whale immediately shorted NVDA with 10X leverage. As of November 9, the position was still open, holding more than $128K in unrealized gains, while funding fees switched positive, according to on-chain position data. Positive funding rates have shorts collecting payments from longs, meaning bearish positions earn an income stream for as long as the imbalance persists.

The same whale also shorted BTC with 30X leverage, showing even more confidence in further crypto market weakness. That position pays a small negative fee, but already carries over $200K in unrealized gains.

An even bigger whale position is valued at over $9.3M, with an unrealized gain of $1.23M. Ten of the total 19 whales on Hyperliquid are going short on NVDA, while long positions are currently carrying unrealized losses and are generally much smaller in value.

Broader Market Spillover

The recent NVDA price moves also go beyond the available tokenized or perpetual futures versions of the stock. The fluctuations have hit leveraged positions and general sentiment across the crypto market, leading to another round of mass liquidations, in which leveraged positions are closed automatically once their losses exhaust posted margin.

As NVDA crashed, BTC responded by sliding to a local low of $73,600, extending the market's general negative sentiment. As Cryptopolitan reported, recent crypto sentiment also takes into account potential investigations against major players. After the US Democratic Party flipped the midterms with a Senate majority, the door opened to increased scrutiny for Binance, Tether, and World Liberty Financial.