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September was a rough month for crypto investors, in particular for those betting big on ether, the token tied to the ethereum blockchain.

Ether dropped 13% for the month, its second-biggest monthly decline in the past year, behind only a 16% slide in June. Bitcoin fell 7% in September.

It’s difficult to link short-term price movements to any specific event, and with the historic rally in crypto over the past 12 months, pullbacks are to be expected. Ethereum, the second most-valuable cryptocurrency behind bitcoin, is still up about 830% in the past year.

Investors are now buying the September dip. On Friday, the first day of October, ether and bitcoin both climbed over 9%.

Ether 12-month price chart
CNBC

But the September roller-coaster reflects a particularly rocky stretch for the ethereum ecosystem, which has given investors and developers reasons for concern.

The speed of the network and high transaction fees continue to be a problem. The “London” upgrade in August was supposed to make transaction fees less volatile, but it’s had a limited effect.

Meanwhile, rival blockchains dubbed “ethereum killers” are taking advantage of ethereum’s challenges.

Ethereum also unexpectedly split into two separate chains in late August, after someone exploited a bug in the software that most people use to connect to the blockchain. That exposed the network to an attack, and not for the first time.

“All these factors could be having some impact on the speculation side, no doubt,” said Mati Greenspan, founder and CEO of Quantum Economics, in an interview. “But don’t forget that ethereum has appreciated quite handsomely so far this year and the entire market seems to be in consolidation at this time. So I wouldn’t try to read too deeply into these short-term movements.”

Still, ethereum, which serves as the primary building block for all sorts of crypto projects, like non-fungible tokens (NFTs), smart contracts and decentralized finance (DeFi), has some major hurdles to overcome to fend off the emerging competition.

Ethereum’s unexpected split

A central premise of ethereum’s security stems from the existence of only one set of virtual books, meaning you can’t create coins out of thin air. That ledger has to work, because the decentralized nature of the blockchain means there’s no rule keeper or bank that sits in the middle of transactions to act as accountant.

Ethereum developers were rightly alarmed in August when the chain split because of a bug.

“This fork temporarily created two separate records of transactions on the ethereum network – like parallel books,” said Matt Hougan, chief investment officer at Bitwise Asset Management, which created the first cryptocurrency index fund.

For a while, it was unclear whether the split would lead to a “double-spend attack,” where the same token can be spent more than once and transactions can be reversed, Hougan said. Smart contracts overseeing billions of dollars in assets could have also been at risk. Smart contracts allow people to build applications on top of ethereum with self-executing code, eliminating the need of third parties to handle transactions.

Such an attack would have been difficult to execute, since it was clear which nodes were on the correct side of the split and which were not. “But in theory, there was a risk,” Hougan said.

The good news for miners and exchanges is that most of them upgraded their software as recommended and the issue was resolved relatively quickly, said Tim Beiko, the coordinator for ethereum’s protocol developers.

Auston Bunsen, co-founder of QuikNode, which provides blockchain infrastructure to developers and companies, said it was a “responsibly disclosed vulnerability.”

“This is a reminder that blockchains in general and ethereum specifically are new and disruptive technologies,” Hougan said. “They can do amazing things – settle $1 billion transactions in minutes and program money like software – but they are not fully mature.”

Bugs keep happening

The longer-term problem for ethereum is that random glitches like this keep happening.

In April, the ethereum blockchain was hit with a bug in one of the software programs used to access it. And in November, many of ethereum’s DeFi apps temporarily went down after a Geth upgrade debacle, which led to the chain splitting in two.

Geth is short for for Go Ethereum. To access the ethereum blockchain, operators and miners have their pick of software. Most use Geth, which accounts for 64% of the network.

When the ethereum blockchain broke in half a few weeks ago, it was because Geth had a bug in its consensus mechanism. That’s what creates the single source of truth for transactions so everyone sees the same thing regardless of what software they’re using.

Developers discovered the bug, put out a new release with a fix and publicly told everyone to update. A lot of users upgraded, but others didn’t. When an unknown actor exploited the bug, ethereum forked, meaning that it broke into two separate chains: one for those who had updated their software and one for those who had not.

Ethereum “sought the veneer of decentralization by having many clients, but as a consequence, they have incompatibilities,” said Nic Carter, co-founder of blockchain data aggregator Coinmetrics.

When the software programs don’t talk to one another, it creates problems for the network.

Bitcoin takes a very different approach. It relies on a highly secure software program for nodes to access the blockchain. Bitcoin developers have long sought to avoid hard forks at all costs, so all changes in the core software tend to be opt in rather than pushed out to users, according to Carter.

“Ethereum prioritizes faster development, but that comes at the cost of a more fragile set of software implementations,” Carter said.

Some crypto experts attribute ethereum’s success to its first-mover advantage. Most NFTs and 78% of DeFi apps, or dApps, run on ethereum, according to the website State of The Dapps.

That’s starting to change, thanks to the growing popularity of rival blockchains. 

Even before this latest split in the blockchain, users were complaining about ethereum’s heavy congestion and high transaction fees, which touched a record of $70 earlier this year, and just this week, bounced from $20 to $46 and back down to $32. 

‘Ethereum killers’

At current prices, fees continue to drive some users away.

They’re turning to blockchains like Cardano, a platform used to build dApps, and Solana, whose native coin has risen nearly 4,800% since September 2020. Launched last year, Solana is gaining traction in the NFT and DeFi ecosystems because it’s cheaper and faster to use than ethereum.

Solana processes 50,000 transactions per second, and its average cost per transaction is $0.00025, according to its website. Ethereum can only handle roughly 13 transactions per second and transaction fees are substantially more expensive than on Solana. 

Institutional money is flowing. Solana just closed a $314 million private token sale led by Andreessen Horowitz and Polychain Capital.

Investors who had been largely focused on ethereum “have been increasingly diversifying their holdings to other cryptocurrencies, fueling alternative blockchains like Algorand, Solana and Cardano,” said Mark Peikin, CEO of Bespoke Growth Partners.

Bunsen tells CNBC that while Solana is making good strides in terms of being a usable blockchain, it’s not yet decentralized enough to satisfy the larger crypto community.

It’s also not immune to bugs. Last month, Solana suffered a 17-hour outage following a denial-of-service attack, which took the form of a flood of transactions caused by bots.

The list of so-called ethereum killers is long, and includes blockchains like Matic and Polygon, which are complementary to ethereum, according to Bunsen, as well Cardano, which is known for its security.

“I think some of those ethereum killers will make it,” said Bunsen. “But they won’t kill ethereum.”

Ethereum also has its own upgrade in the works. For several years, it’s been building ethereum 2.0, which is expected to be ready by the first quarter of 2022.

The makeover will move ethereum to a less energy-intensive mining process and, according to network founder Vitalik Buterin, could boost speed by over 7,000-fold to 100,000 transactions per second.

If it’s successful, Bunsen said, ethereum 2.0 will be a “huge upgrade in terms of throughput to the ethereum network and a huge win for the environment generally.”

WATCH: Here’s what the ethereum upgrade means for ether and miners

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Google hires Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan, others in latest AI talent deal

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Google hires Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan, others in latest AI talent deal

Chief executive officer of Google Sundar Pichai.

Marek Antoni Iwanczuk | Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images

Google on Friday made the latest a splash in the AI talent wars, announcing an agreement to bring in Varun Mohan, co-founder and CEO of artificial intelligence coding startup Windsurf.

As part of the deal, Google will also hire other senior Windsurf research and development employees. Google is not investing in Windsurf, but the search giant will take a nonexclusive license to certain Windsurf technology, according to a person familiar with the matter. Windsurf remains free to license its technology to others.

“We’re excited to welcome some top AI coding talent from Windsurf’s team to Google DeepMind to advance our work in agentic coding,” a Google spokesperson wrote in an email. “We’re excited to continue bringing the benefits of Gemini to software developers everywhere.”

The deal between Google and Windsurf comes after the AI coding startup had been in talks with OpenAI for a $3 billion acquisition deal, CNBC reported in April. OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The move ratchets up the talent war in AI particularly among prominent companies. Meta has made lucrative job offers to several employees at OpenAI in recent weeks. Most notably, the Facebook parent added Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang to lead its AI strategy as part of a $14.3 billion investment into his startup. 

Douglas Chen, another Windsurf co-founder, will be among those joining Google in the deal, Jeff Wang, the startup’s new interim CEO and its head of business for the past two years, wrote in a post on X.

“Most of Windsurf’s world-class team will continue to build the Windsurf product with the goal of maximizing its impact in the enterprise,” Wang wrote.

Windsurf has become more popular this year as an option for so-called vibe coding, which is the process of using new age AI tools to write code. Developers and non-developers have embraced the concept, leading to more revenue for Windsurf and competitors, such as Cursor, which OpenAI also looked at buying. All the interest has led investors to assign higher valuations to the startups.

This isn’t the first time Google has hired select people out of a startup. It did the same with Character.AI last summer. Amazon and Microsoft have also absorbed AI talent in this fashion, with the Adept and Inflection deals, respectively.

Microsoft is pushing an agent mode in its Visual Studio Code editor for vibe coding. In April, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said AI is composing as much of 30% of his company’s code.

The Verge reported the Google-Windsurf deal earlier on Friday.

WATCH: Google pushes “AI Mode” on homepage

Google pushes "AI Mode" on homepage

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Nvidia’s Jensen Huang sells more than $36 million in stock, catches Warren Buffett in net worth

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Nvidia's Jensen Huang sells more than  million in stock, catches Warren Buffett in net worth

Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, holds a motherboard as he speaks during the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, on June 11, 2025.

Gonzalo Fuentes | Reuters

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang unloaded roughly $36.4 million worth of stock in the leading artificial intelligence chipmaker, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

The sale, which totals 225,000 shares, comes as part of Huang’s previously adopted plan in March to unload up to 6 million shares of Nvidia through the end of the year. He sold his first batch of stock from the agreement in June, equaling about $15 million.

Last year, the tech executive sold about $700 million worth of shares as part of a prearranged plan. Nvidia stock climbed about 1% Friday.

Huang’s net worth has skyrocketed as investors bet on Nvidia’s AI dominance and graphics processing units powering large language models.

The 62-year-old’s wealth has grown by more than a quarter, or about $29 billion, since the start of 2025 alone, based on Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index. His net worth last stood at $143 billion in the index, putting him neck-and-neck with Berkshire Hathaway‘s Warren Buffett at $144 billion.

Shortly after the market opened Friday, Fortune‘s analysis of net worth had Huang ahead of Buffett, with the Nvidia CEO at $143.7 billion and the Oracle of Omaha at $142.1 billion.

Read more CNBC tech news

The company has also achieved its own notable milestones this year, as it prospers off the AI boom.

On Wednesday, the Santa Clara, California-based chipmaker became the first company to top a $4 trillion market capitalization, beating out both Microsoft and Apple. The chipmaker closed above that milestone Thursday as CNBC reported that the technology titan met with President Donald Trump.

Brooke Seawell, venture partner at New Enterprise Associates, sold about $24 million worth of Nvidia shares, according to an SEC filing. Seawell has been on the company’s board since 1997, according to the company.

Huang still holds more than 858 million shares of Nvidia, both directly and indirectly, in different partnerships and trusts.

WATCH: Nvidia hits $4 trillion in market cap milestone despite curbs on chip exports

Nvidia hits $4 trillion in market cap milestone despite curbs on chip exports

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Tesla to officially launch in India with planned showroom opening

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Tesla to officially launch in India with planned showroom opening

Elon Musk meets with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at Blair House in Washington DC, USA on February 13, 2025.

Anadolu | Anadolu | Getty Images

Tesla will open a showroom in Mumbai, India next week, marking the U.S. electric carmakers first official foray into the country.

The one and a half hour launch event for the Tesla “Experience Center” will take place on July 15 at the Maker Maxity Mall in Bandra Kurla Complex in Mumbai, according to an event invitation seen by CNBC.

Along with the showroom display, which will feature the company’s cars, Tesla is also likely to officially launch direct sales to Indian customers.

The automaker has had its eye on India for a while and now appears to have stepped up efforts to launch locally.

In April, Tesla boss Elon Musk spoke with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to discuss collaboration in areas including technology and innovation. That same month, the EV-maker’s finance chief said the company has been “very careful” in trying to figure out when to enter the market.

Tesla has no manufacturing operations in India, even though the country’s government is likely keen for the company to establish a factory. Instead the cars sold in India will need to be imported from Tesla’s other manufacturing locations in places like Shanghai, China, and Berlin, Germany.

As Tesla begins sales in India, it will come up against challenges from long-time Chinese rival BYD, as well as local player Tata Motors.

One potential challenge for Tesla comes by way of India’s import duties on electric vehicles, which stand at around 70%. India has tried to entice investment in the country by offering companies a reduced duty of 15% if they commit to invest $500 million and set up manufacturing locally.

HD Kumaraswamy, India’s minister for heavy industries, told reporters in June that Tesla is “not interested” in manufacturing in the country, according to a Reuters report.

Tesla is looking to recruit roles in Mumbai, job listings posted on LinkedIn . These include advisors working in showrooms, security, vehicle operators to collect data for its Autopilot feature and service technicians.

There are also roles being advertised in the Indian capital of New Delhi, including for store managers. It’s unclear if Tesla is planning to launch a showroom in the city.

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