A free AI model from Beijing, Moonshot AI's Kimi K3, released on Thursday, rattled crypto markets, sending Bitcoin and ether sliding and reviving memories of the DeepSeek shock. Kimi K3 is a 2.8 trillion-parameter open-weight model, with full public weights scheduled for July 27, and is free to download and run. It scored 1,679 on Arena’s Frontend Code leaderboard, beating Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 (1,631) and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 (1,618). Following the release, Bitcoin and major cryptocurrencies fell, with traders calling it a “Kimi moment.” Chinese AI rivals Z.ai and MiniMax saw stocks drop 27% and 16% respectively. Bitcoin is increasingly behaving as a leveraged bet on the AI capital cycle, moving with semiconductor and AI infrastructure sentiment rather than on-chain events.