Ship NVFP4 first. Nvidia's proprietary format has taken the distribution default for open weights: measured on Hugging Face on 8/29, NVFP4 had 51.1M downloads over the trailing 30 days versus 1.29M for MXFP4, the open standard co-signed by seven companies, forty to one.
The mainstream narrative expects the open standard co-signed by seven companies to become the default format. The diary reads the download counts: the open-weights ecosystem chose Nvidia's proprietary format on its own, nearly half of the distribution is done for free by the community, and Nvidia is itself a signatory of MXFP4.
Full paginated pull of the unauthenticated HF API on 2026-08-29: NVFP4 had 51.1M downloads over the trailing 30 days (3330 repos), MXFP4 1.29M (1608 repos). 46.6% of NVFP4 downloads sit outside the Nvidia organization; the largest distributor is community quantizer unsloth at 8.69M. Nvidia is reportedly seeking to buy Hugging Face for $12.9B; as of 8/29 the deal is not signed and both sides declined to comment.
For founders: do not put "supports the open standard" in your pitch; ship NVFP4 weights first and measure distribution only by third-party repo downloads. For investors: mark down quantization and inference toolchains that bet only on MXFP4, and value distribution built on HF as a rented channel, since the platform terms allow service to be terminated at any time.