The oversupply of graphics processing units (GPUs) has reached the streets of Vietnam, with Lê Thành sharing photos and videos of a street vendor selling graphics cards by the kilo on Facebook.

The self-proclaimed “King of VGA” posted photos of GPUs stacked up on the curbside and videos of the seller weighing bundles of GPUs and selling them.

Lê Thành also shared photos from inside his shop, showing stacks of graphics cards of all major brands.

To keep with the parody of the Vietnamese street food stall, he also shared a video of the vendor waving flies away using a net.

A scooter rider then stops at the stall to buy a bundle of GPUs after the vendor weighs them.

The oversupply of graphics cards is likely due to the end of the Ethereum mining era.

As a result, consumer GPU prices have slid since the Ethereum Merge, and according to Tom’s Hardware, manufacturers expect sales to decline quarter-over-quarter.

The Ethereum Merge — also known as the Bellatrix hard fork — took place on Tuesday, 6 September 2022, and involved switching the blockchain’s underlying mechanism for validating transactions.

The Merge migrated the blockchain to a proof-of-stake system, which the Ethereum Foundation said would reduce its energy requirements by 99.95%.

Before the transition, Ethereum used a computationally intensive proof-of-work consensus mechanism.

Proof-of-work relies on “mining”, where computers perform millions of calculations per second to solve a complex mathematical problem to help secure and validate transactions on the blockchain.

Proof-of-stake requires validators to put up an amount of cryptocurrency as collateral.

Validators that make a mistake, go offline, or try to defraud the system then stand to lose some or all of their collateral.