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ACCRA, GHANA – On the afternoon of Dec. 26, 2022, Chris Maurice finally capitulated and went to the emergency room at Hospital Clinic de Barcelona, just west of the city’s gothic quarter. For roughly ten months, the 26-year-old CEO of the largest centralized crypto exchange in Africa had ignored many of the symptoms consistent with malaria as he bounced between 21 different countries on the continent, advising heads of state on bitcoin adoption and setting up institutional accounts for his business, Yellow Card.

By the time Maurice was admitted to the intensive care unit, plasmodium parasites had been wreaking havoc on his red blood cells for nearly a year, multiplying in his liver and threatening to shut down many of his major organs, including his kidneys. His face and eyes were yellow from jaundice. As his hemoglobin levels plummeted in response to the intravenous meds administered as treatment, four days of blood transfusions helped save his life.

But to Maurice, his brush with death was simply the price of doing business. Since graduating from Auburn University in Alabama with a finance degree four years ago, he has traded security and stability for a career on the road, all with the goal of fundamentally disrupting Africa’s broken financial system. 

“I’ve slept more nights than I can count in the Joburg airport,” Maurice told CNBC on the sidelines of the Africa Bitcoin Conference in Ghana. “I’ve mastered the art of where to go to find chairs with no armrests. I’m six-foot-five, so I need my space.”

For nearly 1.4 million users across the continent, Yellow Card – which offers an experience similar to Block‘s Cash App – is a vital lifeline to money. 

“We wanted to make it as easy as possible for anybody to be able to come on and buy crypto within three minutes,” explains Maurice in an Uber ride cutting due south through the Ghanaian capital of Accra. 

Yellow Card CEO Chris Maurice just before meeting with the Securities and Exchange Commission in Accra, Ghana.

Chris Maurice

From there, Yellow Card users can send or receive digital cash in eligible markets. But unlike a centralized exchange like Coinbase, where many customers store their tokens for an extended period of time hoping that their digital assets will appreciate in value, the average customer on Maurice’s exchange keeps money on the platform for under five minutes. People take their local fiat currency, turn it into bitcoin or a U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin like tether to send it across a border, and the recipient instantly cashes it out.

“It’s literally like, I deposit a million Francs in Cameroon, I buy USDT or BTC, and then I send it off,” continued Maurice. 

Yellow Card customers can receive cryptocurrency from anywhere in the world and pay only a network fee, which typically ranges from 5 cents to $1, according to Maurice. That is especially helpful for people who would customarily turn to a money service provider like Western Union and MoneyGram, which sometimes charge heavy commissions on remittances.

The service is a game-changer for many Africans, who rely on money sent home from abroad, especially in countries where unemployment and inflation is rife. The latest data from the World Bank shows that in Sub-Saharan Africa – where up to 65% of adults are unbanked – remittance flows reached $50 billion in 2021, the most recent year for which data is available. The actual number is likely much higher when you factor in money transferred over informal channels. Meanwhile, World Bank data shows that it is more expensive to send remittances to Sub-Saharan Africa than to any other region in the world. On average, it costs $15.60 (7.8%) to send $200 to or from Africa. That percentage can be as high as $38, or 19%, in some countries.

Building the crypto payment rails necessary for Yellow Card requires jumping through a lot of legal and regulatory hoops, which is why Maurice spends about nine months a year in the countries where he operates or plans to launch crypto services. He has local lawyers in pretty much every country on the continent, and he meets with elected officials and regulators to further foam the runway for adoption. The level of hospitality varies widely across the continent.

Yellow Card CEO Chris Maurice in Accra, Ghana loading cash onto his Mobile Money account, MoMo.

Chris Maurice

Maurice stands out pretty much wherever he goes thanks to his height and plume of curly black hair. His speech is punctuated with laughs and smiles, and that friendly demeanor puts people at ease. But it’s underpinned by an intense work ethic — he’s got a black belt in TaeKwonDo, was an Eagle Scout in his youth and a finalist for Rhodes and Marshall scholarships in college. He also cares deeply about revolutionizing a broken financial system. These traits help enlist supporters for his longshot ideas – like launching a centralized cryptocurrency exchange in Africa from his dorm room in Auburn, Alabama.

Yellow Card has facilitated $1.75 billion in transactions since launching in 2019 and has about 220 employees – mostly in Africa. The exchange lets users send money to 16 countries on the continent – and crucially, at the other end of that transaction, the platform has streamlined the process of converting crypto back to local currencies.

On a good day, the service will do $5 million in transactions. On a slow day, it is closer to $1 million, according to Maurice.

The company has also raised $57 million, including from Jack Dorsey’s Block and Valar Ventures, a venture capital firm co-founded by Peter Thiel. Maurice says his ultimate goal is to expand service to the rest of the continent and turn Yellow Card into a billion-dollar company, up from its current valuation of $200 million. In practice, that means capitalizing on the exchange’s first-mover advantage.

“I realized very early on that there’s so much opportunity in all these countries and that we needed to be the first one there,” said Maurice. 

“I drove from South Africa to Botswana, Zimbabwe to Zambia, then flew up to Ethiopia, Ghana, and Uganda. In all of these places, I was doing the grunt work – things like company registration and opening bank accounts, so that we would be ready to go.”

Maurice doesn’t stay anywhere for long, but the transient lifestyle suits him. He’s currently in Barcelona, but it’s just an apartment in a timezone that lets him take his morning work calls from a desk, rather than the shower. 

“I can brush my teeth in peace,” Maurice says with his trademark smile.

Africa Bitcoin Conference delves into real-world use cases for crypto

How money moves in Africa

Moving money in Africa is an expensive and complicated process.

Commercial bank branch access is limited, especially for people living in remote and rural areas. Digital banking options are also limited. The latest stats from the World Bank show that just 29% of the population in Sub-Saharan Africa uses the internet. Tack on rampant hyperinflation, widespread government corruption, and capital controls trapping domestic cash in banks, and money can stop making sense altogether.

“If someone wants to move money to the country next door, normally, you’d have to fill up a suitcase full of cash and move it over the border,” explains Ray Youssef, the CEO of Paxful, a peer-to-peer crypto marketplace where users can exchange tokens with one another.

Companies like Western Union and MoneyGram offer an expansive physical network of storefronts around the world designed to move money for those who are unbanked. That cash network was extraordinarily difficult and expensive to build, which is why there aren’t a lot of direct competitors. It is also why those cash transfers often incur substantial fees.

“The entire system of cross-border payments is all about rent-seeking. That’s what it’s designed to do,” argues Alex Gladstein, chief strategy officer for the Human Rights Foundation, an organization that works with human rights activists from authoritarian regimes around the world.

“It’s not designed to help you move money from A to B. It’s designed by someone who’s going to make money off you moving money from A to B,” continues Gladstein.

If someone wants to move money to the country next door, normally, you’d have to fill up a suitcase full of cash and move it over the border.

Ray Youssef

Paxful CEO

Part of the problem stems from the continent’s quasi-colonial payment framework, in which roughly 80% of cross-border payments originating from African banks are processed offshore, mostly in the U.S. or Europe. That translates to higher costs and processing times that are sometimes measured in weeks.

“The mainstream way of approaching this is, ‘Oh, let’s just Africanize it. Let’s replace the intermediaries over there with intermediaries here,'” explains Gladstein. “That’s probably even worse because they’re going to be corrupt and expensive.”

Across the continent, there are fintech companies built on top of the existing banking system. These platforms abstract away the complicated back-office processes, but the fundamental problem remains. These businesses go through the same legacy payment networks, where they spend a lot of money settling payments — costs which they then pass on to customers.

The Pan-African Payment and Settlement System, or PAPSS, launched in Jan. 2022 with a goal of bringing existing payment systems together under one interoperable network. But it’s too early to tell through official metrics whether PAPSS has begun to deliver on its promise of saving African users more than $5 billion in annual transaction fees.

An employee uses a Nokia 1200 mobile phone inside an M-Pesa store in Nairobi, Kenya, on Sunday, April 14, 2013.

Trevor Snap | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Then there’s mobile money, which has been around since the early 2000s. Think of it like an electronic wallet tied to a phone number that does not require a smartphone or data to operate. Users can pay bills and shop with their phone through SMS texting, instead of having to rely on traditional banking options.

Africa’s mobile money transactions rose 39% to more than $700 billion in 2021, according to data from the GSM Association, a non-profit representing mobile network operators worldwide. World Bank data shows that account ownership at a financial institution — or via a mobile money service provider — has more than doubled in the last decade, rising to 55% of adults in Sub-Saharan Africa.

But even as adoption proliferates, mobile money users don’t get the perks of legacy banking, including earning interest on banked savings and building up a credit score based on a history of spending. Interoperability on the continent also remains a major issue with this alternative way of banking.

“The entire banking system in Africa is completely and utterly broken, even amongst the mobile money providers, the telcos,” said Youssef from Paxful.

“Two thousand payment networks and only 2% of them talk to each other. That number continues to grow. It’s not getting better, it’s actually getting worse,” continued Youssef.

Take M-Pesa, short for “mobile” and the Swahili word for money — “pesa.” It’s Kenya’s version of mobile money, and it’s incredibly popular there. M-Pesa operates in seven different African countries, but you can’t send money from M-Pesa Kenya to M-Pesa Ghana.

A resident checks his phone outside a mobile money kiosk in the Kibera district of Nairobi, Kenya, on Monday, Aug. 1, 2022.

Michele Spatari | Bloomberg | Getty Images

“Even on the same network, owned by the same company, because of regulations, those two networks don’t talk to each other,” said Youssef.

One solution for moving money across borders is the centralized crypto exchange that Maurice built. The Yellow Card CEO says he would ultimately love to tie in with the Western Union network to help bring those costs for the customer to essentially zero through crypto, given that half of all the world’s remittance is still cash on both ends.

Another option for making international payments on the continent are peer-to-peer digital asset marketplaces, like the one that Youssef runs.

“People find each other, they do a trade, there’s an escrow which removes the trust from at least one side, and the deal is done,” Youssef told CNBC on the sidelines of the Africa Bitcoin Conference.

Paxful has facilitated $5 billion in transaction volume in Africa since it launched, though Youssef says it’s only a small fraction of the entire peer-to-peer market.

“Most of it happens on instant messenger, or on the street,” he said. “Africans have been doing peer-to-peer finance for a very long time; one might say over 1,400 years. So this is nothing new to them.”

Yellow Card CEO Chris Maurice in a hospital in Douala, Cameroon, recovering from food poisoning after eating cow skins.

Chris Maurice

From Taco Bell to Nigeria 

On a 15-minute drive from Accra’s embassy-heavy Labone District down to the Atlantic Coast, Maurice describes himself as being as Southern as it gets. Before touching down in Nigeria in 2019 to launch his company, the New Orleans native hadn’t traveled much beyond the Southeastern seaboard of the U.S.

“My entire worldview was essentially confined to two states – Louisiana and Alabama,” said Maurice. “I had only been on a plane four times before flying to Lagos on a six-day-old passport with no visa and no shots.”

Despite his limited travels to that point, Maurice was no stranger to the difficulties associated with moving money around the planet. 

Starting in the fifth grade, he used his father’s eBay account to sell Pokemon cards and other collectibles online – a venture that would ultimately cover his college tuition at Auburn. But the business of sending and receiving cash internationally wasn’t always straightforward. Some of his customers in Pakistan, for example, weren’t able to use PayPal. Bank wires were also not an option.

To get paid, Maurice instead had to wait in line at a local Western Union branch. It cost the buyer a hefty fee, and it cost Maurice time – and gas money

At the age of 18, Maurice turned his attention to bitcoin and soon grew convinced that the world’s biggest cryptocurrency was the answer to his problems. It also presented a new business opportunity. 

In 2015, Maurice and his freshman roommate’s best friend, Justin Poiroux, decided to get into bitcoin trading by running their own over-the-counter trading desk out of the Taco Bell on South Gay Street in Auburn.

“We started putting out ads on Craigslist that basically said, ‘We have bitcoin. Come give us cash,'” explained Maurice. 

Every Wednesday at 7pm, he and Poiroux, a tech-savvy coder, would grab a spot in the back and split a 12-pack of Doritos Locos Tacos while drop-ins would swap dollars for bitcoin. Customers would slap a couple hundred dollars down on the table (bitcoin was trading at around $250 at the time), scan a QR code, and that was it. On the backend, Maurice and Poiroux were using LocalBitcoins, a peer-to-peer exchange, to carry out the trades. 

At the time, Maurice says, his OTC desk offered an easier onramp to crypto than Coinbase, whose interface was tough to navigate. Profits came from the arbitrage play between payment methods, since bank transfers and cash had different fees.

As for the location? Maurice says he chose Taco Bell because it offered the “perfect amount of apathy.”

“This operation would have never flown at a Chick-fil-A,” he said.

Yellow Card CEO Chris Maurice in Amboseli, Kenya.

Chris Maurice

After two weeks, business was booming, so they decided to expand the franchise. 

“We started calling up friends from high school who were now at LSU, Yale, Georgia, Alabama, anywhere that we knew someone,” continued Maurice. “A few weeks later, we had seven Taco Bells on the eastern United States, all within college campuses, where you could walk in and buy bitcoin.”

Four months later, the Taco Bell trading desks were moving thousands of dollars in bitcoin. They weren’t too rigorous on the accounting at the time, but Maurice estimates that roughly thirty thousand dollars was exchanged across the entire franchise.

“Then one day, Justin and I were talking and we said, ‘Man, we should really do something less sketchy with our lives’.”

Then Maurice had a chance meeting at a Wells Fargo near campus that changed his life.

“I meet this Nigerian guy who is sending $200 to his family, and the bank charged him $90,” Maurice recalled.

“I’m like, ‘Man, have you heard of bitcoin?'” continued Maurice. “I explained to him what bitcoin is and how he could try it out by downloading Coinbase.”

There was just one problem: He had no idea what would happen on the other end of the transfer.

“What on earth is this guy’s mom going to do with $200 worth of bitcoin?” he said.

“I started skipping class and researching what the banking system was like in Nigeria – and the currency,” said Maurice. “Could you buy bitcoin in Nigeria? Could you sell it?'”

Maurice and Poiroux decided that the core market for Yellow Card should be the people who stood to benefit the most from an alternative, international payment network that cut out extra transaction fees and wait times.

While Poiroux stayed behind in Alabama to continue building and maintaining the tech that fueled the entire operation, Maurice set off to Lagos to establish a physical presence, including laying all of the regulatory groundwork needed to get the business off the ground.

Centralizing crypto payments seemed like the obvious thing to do. Up until their launch, peer-to-peer crypto payments on Binance, Paxful, or other more regional exchanges had been the status quo for many wanting to trade and invest in digital tokens.

“Generally, the reason that people use centralized exchanges is for the experience, right? It’s significantly easier to use Coinbase than it is to use MetaMask, which involves trying to figure out how to get your own ethereum and store your own keys,” explains Maurice.

Having the edge on general licensing has also put Yellow Card ahead of the competition.

“The amount of local expertise that is required to get some of these payment service providers signed, as well as registering entities and setting up bank accounts — it is such a different way of doing business than in other parts of the world,” Poiroux tells CNBC.

Yellow Card CEO Chris Maurice on a roadtrip from South Africa, north to Zambia.

Chris Maurice

Running Yellow Card

Poiroux doesn’t crave the limelight — he has always worked behind the scenes, unconcerned with notching public accolades. If Yellow Card were a band, he’d be the drummer or bass player, keeping everything solid in the background while Maurice took center stage as the lead singer.

Poiroux started coding when he was 10, because he wanted to make his own video games. But after reading the bitcoin white paper, he became obsessed with the idea of decentralized, unstoppable software.

The Yellow Card co-founder and chief technology officer dropped out of college freshman year, and instead holed up in his off-campus apartment teaching himself how to be a full-stack developer through a combination of YouTube tutorials and engineering blogs. It took a year and a half of coding for 16 hours a day for him to build the beta of Yellow Card, and he mostly did it himself.

“If something needs to be built, I will learn, figure it out, and build it,” Poiroux says, with a hint of a Southern drawl. “Fairly confident this comes from my background as a farmboy from Alabama.”

Poiroux, who had been on a presidential scholarship to Auburn before quitting school, said he kept his off-campus apartment all four years so that he could still get the college experience of going to bars and football games. His parents eventually got on board after he and Maurice landed their first $100,000 in venture funding.

Today, Poiroux runs his own fleet of 40 software engineers across 13 countries who are responsible for keeping the entire operation going. His team is in charge of everything from patching bugs in the code to creating technical workarounds for nationwide internet cuts.

“A lot of the infrastructure dependencies in Africa aren’t reliable and so you have to build a lot of logic surrounding it that you wouldn’t necessarily, originally think of,” explains Poiroux.

In Zambia, for example, it is not uncommon for the largest mobile phone network, MTN, to go down for two to three days. Extended network downtime means having to deal with pending transactions and bracing for more extreme edge cases. Third-party infrastructure dependency is another big sticking point, particularly when it comes to the availability of the network and the payment service providers.

Poiroux first went to Lagos in 2020, and he now makes it back to Africa every three to four months, rotating between Yellow Card engineering hubs in Kenya, South Africa, and Nigeria.

Part of what makes Yellow Card so convenient for users is its interoperability with existing banking options, as well as alternative payment service providers, including mobile money. While the platform will custody crypto assets if users want to keep their tokens on the exchange, very few choose to do so. Poiroux emphasizes the fact that they are really more the gateway to crypto.

Africa Bitcoin Conference kicks off as FTX collapse shakes confidence in crypto

As the counter-party for all trades, Yellow Card also market makes on the exchange against African currencies, a feature which proves crucial when it comes to reducing price volatility and fairly pricing assets.

“We’ll buy several million dollars a day worth of naira,” Maurice says, referring to the Nigerian local currency. “We’re one of the few companies that will actually take on local African fiats.”

35-year-old Franklin Okoye, who works in the Nigerian capital, Abuja, earns a living by helping businesses to import goods like clothes and chemicals from China. Okoye says that he and other merchants use Yellow Card specifically because it offers “very competitive” market rates when he has to convert between tether and the Nigerian naira.

“We have difficulty in Nigeria here accessing dollars to make payments abroad. So everyone is looking for alternative ways of making payments,” said Okoye, adding that he swaps more than $1 million worth of naira for tether (and vice versa) on Yellow Card each month. “Everyone is going to crypto.”

Beyond the remittance use case, many customers use the platform to hedge against inflation and currency devaluation by holding some of their local currency in a U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin like tether, according to Yellow Card’s director of special projects, Oparinde Babatunde. He thinks that’s a big reason why crypto’s latest bear market didn’t hurt their business — the need to protect against inflation has only gone up as governments around the world began printing cash during the pandemic.

Maurice tells CNBC that Yellow Card’s business customers are also using the platform to pay for expenses like their Amazon Web Services bill, and Poiroux added that they have seen some of their retail customers earn money by informally day trading and trying to find arbitrage opportunities between coins.

“We have tons of people who use Yellow Card essentially as a full-time job,” Poiroux said.

Yellow Card CEO Chris Maurice and his

Chris Maurice

Spreading the bitcoin gospel

Nowadays, Poiroux spends less time in the weeds of coding. Instead, he devotes most of his waking hours to thinking about what comes next and how to scale the business specifically to meet the needs of the people for whom he built the platform.

“Our approach is — and this has been my approach on the technical side — to build one solution, one platform — where we can quickly plug-and-play other functionalities,” Poiroux tells CNBC from Atlanta, where he’s working between visits to his production hubs in Africa.

“Think things like new payment service providers, so that we can scale quickly and make crypto as accessible as possible,” he said, noting that other crypto payment platforms have taken the opposite approach, hyper-focusing on big markets like Nigeria instead of the entirety of the continent.

Poiroux says that in addition to the retail-facing part of the business, the enterprise side of the operation is also a major priority. Yellow Card offers a Payments API that enables companies around the world to collect and disburse funds in Africa without currency devaluation risk.

“The super-cool part is that it uses the same infrastructure as our retail platform,” Poiroux explains of yet another project he architected and helped to code. “So if we expand our retail business, we can instantly make that available to the companies that have integrated this service already.”

In the meantime, both Maurice and Poiroux are spreading the gospel of bitcoin pretty much everywhere they go. Last summer, for instance, Maurice advised Central African Republic on adopting bitcoin as legal tender.

Maurice and his Cameroonian lawyer were brought to Bangui to meet with the minister of public works, who is in charge of the country’s crypto strategy. About halfway through the meeting, the electricity cut out, which meant no AC and no light for the remainder of the conversation.

“We were in a dark room with no windows talking about how the country would be tokenizing everything from their natural resources, to Makumba gorillas,” Maurice recalls.

The conversation didn’t miss a beat, because everyone at the table was engrossed in the conversation at hand — how other countries had been taking advantage of Central African Republic through currency controls for its entire history and how bitcoin presented the country with its first real opportunity to determine its own finances.

Bitcoin gives them a chance to control their own destiny — to keep their money outside of foreign banks, in their own country, to use how they see fit,” Maurice said. “It really is financial freedom.”

Yellow Card CEO Chris Maurice with his Cameroonian lawyer, Jonie Fonyam, and Central African Republic’s Minister for Public Works, Pascal Koyagbele.

Chris Maurice

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Aventon Soltera 2.5 e-bike’s first discount to $999, Autel’s new 80A EV charging station at $899 low, EcoFlow 4-day flash sale, more

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Aventon Soltera 2.5 e-bike's first discount to 9, Autel's new 80A EV charging station at 9 low, EcoFlow 4-day flash sale, more

Leading today’s Green Deals is the first-ever discount on Aventon’s newest Soltera 2.5 Lightweight Commuter e-bike at $999 that is joining the brand’s Final Summer/Labor Day Sale. We also spotted Autel’s latest and most powerful MaxiCharger AC Pro 80A Level 2 EV Charger dropping back to its $899 low for the second time, as well as one of its cheaper 40A alternatives. There’s also EcoFlow’s final Labor Day Flash Sale lasting through the weekend, as well as some dash cam options, an EcoFlow solar bundle, a BougeRV electric cooler to fit any vehicle, a one-day-only Anker SOLIX bundle, and more waiting for you below. Plus, all the hangover savings are at the bottom of the page, like yesterday’s Lectric Long-Range XP Trike2 750 preorder deal, the Bluetti flash sale lows that will be ending tonight, and more.

Head below for other New Green Deals we’ve found today and, of course, Electrek’s best EV buying and leasing deals. Also, check out the new Electrek Tesla Shop for the best deals on Tesla accessories.

Review: The ST3 Pro e-scooter brings serious suspension alongside smart controls and more as Navee’s latest flagship

As a long-time rider of Segway electric scooters, my expectations are quite high for new brands looking to climb their way up to the standard that the household-name has set in stone at this point. Only within the last few months did Navee come onto my radar, with the brand offering me the chance to test out its latest flagship model, the ST3 Pro Electric Scooter, which has been quite the surprise, to say the least. At first, it seemed like it was full of gimmicks that were destined to fail, but after riding around for several weeks now, I can happily say that Segway may just have found a new challenger. Head below to get my hands-on impressions of this high-end e-scooter that still retains accessible pricing for the stunning list of features.

To get our full hands-on impression of this new flagship e-scooter, be sure to check out our review here.

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woman riding Aventon Soltera 2.5 e-bike through street

Aventon slashes $200 off new Soltera 2.5 lightweight commuter e-bike for first time, now $999

As part of its ongoing Final Summer Sale/Labor Day Sale through September 3, Aventon has given us the first discount on its new Soltera 2.5 Lightweight Commuter e-bike for $999 shipped. While it hit the market back at the start of the year, it’s been spending all the time since keeping at its $1,199 MSRP, which we’re finally seeing brought down during this sale thanks to these first-ever savings. You’re looking at a $200 markdown that drops the costs down to where its predecessor sat for most of last year, giving you an affordable and lightweight commuter at its best price yet.

Like its predecessors, the Aventon Soltera 2.5 e-bike is a lightweight commuter that is perfect for those living in urban environments, with the 46-pound weight being much more manageable when it comes to carrying it up and down stairs. This model brings much of the same specs and features we saw on the Soltera.2 model, like the 350W brushless rear-hub motor (peaking at 540W) and 9.6Ah battery combo for a 20 MPH top speed for up to 46 miles of pedal-assisted travel (four mode options) on a single charge. One notable upgrade here, though, is the inclusion of a thumb throttle so you’re not just limited to pedal assistance, but keep in mind this lowers its overall mileage.

And for the price, you’re getting a solid array of features with Aventon’s Soltera 2.5 e-bike that only makes the experience here better, including the hydraulic disc brakes, front and rear integrated lighting that offers turn signal functionality, Kenda tires, the continuance of a torque sensor, a Shimano Tourney 7-speed derailleur, a backlit LCD screen for setting adjustments on top of the USB port for charging devices, and more.

Be sure to check out Aventon’s full updated lineup of Final Summer/Labor Day deals that will be continuing through September 3.

man charging EV with Autel's MaxiCharger AC Pro 80A EV charger
Photo: BLUETTI

Autel’s newest and most powerful MaxiCharger AC Pro 80A level 2 EV charger drops back to $899 low, more

By way of its official Amazon storefront, Autel is offering the second-ever chance to pick up its new MaxiCharger AC Pro 80A Level 2 EV Charger back at $899 shipped, which matches the price we’re seeing directly from the brand’s website. We saw the first discount bring costs down from its full $1,299 price tag at the end of July, when it fell to this same rate. Now, you’re getting a second chance at this all-time low price, complete with $400 in savings, which gives you the brand’s newest and largest EV charging option for residential use.

If you want to learn more about this new model, or its cheaper alternative, be sure to check out our original coverage of these deals here.

computer on desk kept running by EcoFlow's DELTA 3 Plus portable power station

EcoFlow’s final Labor Day flash sale lasts through the weekend with up to 47% discounts on four units starting from $649

We’re in the final days of EcoFlow’s Labor Day Sale running up to the holiday, with the brand having launched a 4-day flash sale that is taking up to 47% off four different units. Among them, you’ll find the DELTA 3 Plus Portable Power Station bundled with a waterproof protective bag for $649 shipped, which beats out Amazon, where you’d have to buy the station and the bag separately for $778 right now. This bundle normally fetches $878 at full price, which we’ve seen brought as low as $616 in past sales direct from the brand while three past exclusive deals have seen it go as low as $541. You’re looking at a 26% markdown here for the next few days of the sale, giving you $229 in savings at the best price we can find. Head below for more on this and the other units seeing discounts during this sale.

If you want to learn more about this power station or the other units seeing discounts, be sure to check out our original coverage of this 4-day flash sale here.

VIOFO A229 Plus dual dash cam system

Save up to 32% on VIOFO’s A229 series of two and three-channel dash cams starting from $170

Over at VIOFO’s official Amazon storefront, you can find its A229 Plus Front and Rear Dash Cam down at $169.99 shipped. This dual-cam setup has mostly been keeping between $230 and $200 throughout 2025, though we did see it drop earlier in the year to $180, while more recently repeating falls to $170 and getting a one-time-only appearance of the $160 low during July’s Prime Day event. Aside from that short-lived low price, you’re otherwise looking at the best rate we have tracked thanks to the $60 price cut from its tag. Head below to learn more about this model and its two upgraded counterparts that are also seeing discounts.

If you want to learn more about this dash cam, or the other upgraded counterparts seeing discounts, be sure to check out our original coverage of these deals here.

Man in grass field connecting EcoFlow's DELTA 2 power station to solar panels

Get off-grid support with EcoFlow’s DELTA 2 solar generator bundle with a 220W panel at $699

Through its official Amazon storefront, EcoFlow is undercutting its own direct sale pricing on the DELTA 2 Solar Generator bundle that includes a 220W panel for $699 shipped, which beats out its direct pricing by $8 (including the bonus 5% savings). While the package would normally cost you $1,648 at full price direct from the brand, it starts off at Amazon at $1,299, which we’ve seen keeping between $899 and $749 regularly in 2025, with several drops lower – including a one-time fall to the new $659 low that has only appeared during July’s Prime Day sale. Aside from that one-time deal, you’re otherwise looking at the best price we have tracked, giving you $600 in savings ($949 off the MSRP).

If you want to learn more about this solar generator’s capabilities, be sure to check out our original coverage of this deal here.

two women loading BougeRV's 30-quart electric cooler into trunk of SUV

This BougeRV 30-quart electric cooler plugs into any vehicle’s power supply to keep things chilled/frozen at $207

By way of its official Amazon storefront, BougeRV is offering a return of the best pricing on its 12V 30-quart Electric Vehicle Refrigerator/Freezer at $206.99 shipped. It normally fetches $270 at full price, which we’ve mostly seen dropping between $230 and $220 for most of 2025, with more recent falls to $210 and this first-time drop to $207. While we have seen it go a bit lower to $204 in the past, you’re otherwise looking at the best price we have tracked, which equips any of your vehicles with a low-energy cooler at $63 off the going rate.

If you want to learn more about this electric cooler, be sure to check out our original coverage of this deal here.

woman charging tablet using Anker SOLIX C300X DC power station and 60W solar panel

For today only, you can get Anker’s SOLIX C300X DC station with a book-sized 60W panel back at $237

As part of its Deals of the Day, Best Buy is offering the Anker SOLIX C300X DC Portable Power Station with 60W foldable solar panel back at $236.99 shipped. We saw this same one-day-only deal pop up two weeks ago, bringing the costs down from its $330 tag, though it fetches a lower $300 rate directly from Anker’s website (currently at $270), while at Amazon, you can only find its grey variant that currently sits $13 higher. Discounts over the year have mostly taken the price down to $250 with drops as low as $220 back in February. You’re looking at the third-best price we’ve tracked in 2025 and the fourth-best overall, coming in $47 above the low last seen during Black Friday.

If you want to learn more about this setup’s capabilities, be sure to check out our original coverage of this one-day-only deal here.

Best Summer EV deals!

Best new Green Deals landing this week

The savings this week are also continuing to a collection of other markdowns. To the same tune as the offers above, these all help you take a more energy-conscious approach to your routine. Winter means you can lock in even better off-season price cuts on electric tools for the lawn while saving on EVs and tons of other gear.

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The Chevy Blazer and Equinox EVs are the most affordable electric vehicles to insure

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The Chevy Blazer and Equinox EVs are the most affordable electric vehicles to insure

The electric Chevy Equinox and Blazer are the most affordable EVs to insure. According to a new study, Chevy’s electric SUVs topped the list, but Hyundai had the most models in the top ten.

What are the top 10 most affordable EVs to insure?

I’m sure you’ve heard by now that electric vehicles can be more costly to insure than internal combustion engine (ICE) or hybrid vehicles.

Insurance rates vary throughout the US, but much of the higher cost is due to parts repairs. For example, according to a recent study from Insurify, the Tesla Model X is the most expensive EV to insure.

Why? Because it has more expensive parts, like the falcon-wing doors, which can cost thousands to repair alone, depending on the severity.

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The report also points out that fewer EVs in a certain area means fewer insurance claims. To protect themselves, insurers will set higher premiums. Electric vehicles cost $4,058 on average to insure, according to Insurify, which is 49% more than the average cost of insuring a gas-powered car.

2026-Chevy-Blazer-EV
Chevy Blazer EV SS (Source: Chevrolet)

For those looking to save, we now have a list of the cheapest electric vehicles to insure. Leading California-based auto insurer, Mercury Insurance, revealed its annual top 10 list of the most affordable EVs to insure.

The Chevy Blazer and Equinox EVs topped the list, followed by the Nissan Leaf, Kia Niro EV, and Ford F-150 Lightning.

Hyundai-IONIQ-EVs-insurance
Hyundai’s new 2025 IONIQ 5 Limited with a Tesla NACS port (Source: Hyundai)

Hyundai’s Kona Electric ranked sixth, followed by the Mini Cooper SE, all Hyundai IONIQ models (IONIQ 5, IONIQ 6, and IONIQ 9), and the Fiat 500e. The Subaru Solterra and Toyota bZ4X tied for tenth.

“With federal EV tax credits set to expire in the near future, now is the time to get into an EV for consumers who are interested in one,” Chong Gao, Director of Product Management R&D for Mercury Insurance, said.

Rank Electric Vehicle
1 Chevy Blazer EV
2 Chevy Equinox EV
3 Nissan Leaf
4 Kia Niro EV
5 Ford F-150 Lightning
6 Hyundai Kona EV
7 Mini Cooper SE
8 Hyundai IONIQ 5, IONIQ 6, IONIQ 9 (all EV models)
9 Fiat 500e
10 Subaru Solterra/ Toyota bZ4X
Top 10 most affordable EVs to insure (Source: Mercury Insurance)

Gao said that although insurance costs can be higher, there are still clear benefits to owning an EV, including lower operating costs.

Looking to secure the $7,500 EV tax credit while it’s still here? We can help you find electric vehicles in your area. Check out our links below to find deals on top-selling EV models near you.

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Slate to retool a production facility in Indiana, where it expects to create 2,000 jobs

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Slate to retool a production facility in Indiana, where it expects to create 2,000 jobs

Young “Bare bones” BEV startup Slate announced it is making Indiana the home of production of its flagship model. The company opened the door to the site of its future Slate EV production today, kicking off a process that intends to bring trucks to the public by the end of next year.

It’s always exciting to see an update from young American startups like Slate. This company piqued our interest after launching a tongue-in-cheek website this past March and then coming out of hiding a month later with one helluva flagship model.

It was then that we learned about the startup’s “Blank Slate” design, which revolves around a simplified all-electric pickup with over 100 accessories and a five-seat SUV configuration kit. We also learned that this new model was expected to start below $20,000 after US tax incentives, but that target seems far less likely now that the Trump administration has nixed many of those incentives.

Still, an all-electric pickup starting under $30k should entice many American consumers, and it appears it already has. Back in mid-May, a representative for Slate told Electrek that it had already secured 100,000 reservations for its flagship BEV.

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Granted, those reservations only required a $50 deposit, so we’d expect a mere fraction of that to come to fruition if and when Slate reaches production, but the initial appetite is clearly there.

Speaking of production, Slate hit a noteworthy milestone today, opening the doors to an existing facility in Indiana. It intends to retool and repurpose it to support BEV manufacturing in 2026.

Slate Indiana
Slate CEO Chris Barman speaking at the Warsaw facility/ Source: Slate

Slate looks to build its EVs in Warsaw, Indiana next year

Today, Slate began its “Demo Day” in Warsaw, Indiana – home to its first planned manufacturing facility. The startup opened its doors and entered the facility in Kosciusko County, which is about an hour Northwest of Fort Wayne, for the first time this morning.

The existing Indiana structure, a former printing plant, will be refurbished to suit Slate’s production needs as it looks to achieve series production and roll its first customer-built EVs off those pending assembly line by Q4 2026. Slate CEO Chris Barman spoke:

What Slate is about to build for America begins in Warsaw. We’re retooling the factory in such a way that truly allows for manufacturing simplicity and rapid scaling. The Blank Slate is made the same way, each and every time: designed to be accessorized and wrapped by the customer after it leaves the factory.

By calling Warsaw, Indiana, home, Slate said it expects to create over 2,000 new jobs and contribute up $39 billion to the local economy over the next 20 years. For now, the immediate focus will be on retooling the Warsaw plant to gear up for BEV production next year. Reservations are still open.

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