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Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin in Prague, where he finds refuge with like-minded programmers looking to change the world through cryptography-powered technology.

CNBC

PRAGUE — For Vitalik Buterin, the idea of home is fleeting.

The Russia-born coder, who built ethereum in his late teens, doesn’t stay long in any one city anymore. Meanwhile, the list of places he won’t go keeps growing.

“There’s definitely a bunch of countries that I would have very gladly visited three years ago, that I’m much, much more apprehensive about visiting today,” Buterin told CNBC in an interview in the Czech Republic.

Buterin singled out his homeland of Russia as one of the destinations he now avoids. The Canadian emigre has both Ukrainian and Russian roots but has actively supported the resistance movement in Ukraine. It has also become clear that pursuing privacy technologies and open-source code carries risk in certain global jurisdictions, giving Buterin new hesitation — for instance, the creators behind the open-source protocol Tornado Cash face charges in both the Netherlands and the U.S. Tornado Cash is used by some people to protect their privacy in the still-nascent crypto market, but a mixing service can also be used by criminals or nation-states to launder money. Many in the industry worry that targeting the developers who build a tool, instead of just the bad actors using that tool, sets a dangerous precedent.

“Even in countries that the mainstream considers to still be fairly normal places — I definitely worry about those more,” Buterin says.

The decentralized lifestyle suits Buterin, a 29-year-old programmer whose influence in the crypto sector transcends lines of code — or geography. Prague is one new center of gravity where he now finds refuge with like-minded programmers collectively looking to change the world through cryptography-powered technology.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin speaks at ETHPrague 2023, an international conference drawing crypto developers from around the world.

Photo: Pavel Sinagl

We met in a sparsely furnished room at the top of a sprawling industrial complex in the Holešovice district, a neighborhood once synonymous with slaughterhouses and steam mills, that’s now home to Bohemian artists and some of crypto’s most rebellious believers. The interior of this deceptively nondescript structure is a honeycomb of labyrinthine corridors and winding staircases that snake into its fortress-like belly, echoing the complexity of crypto to the unfamiliar.

Today, the biggest challenge for Buterin and the ethereum community is making sure that it provides actual value to people.

“The way that I see the ethereum ecosystem in general is that the last decade was the decade of kind of playing around and getting ethereum right. This decade is the decade where we have to actually build things that people use,” Buterin said, hands clasped, as he leaned forward from his perch on an ergonomic-friendly kneeling chair.

He is arguably the most influential cryptographic developer alive today, but Buterin wasn’t trying to step into the limelight when he wrote the ethereum white paper in 2013. Still, years after shunning public accolades and demurring countless invitations to speak to the press, he can’t shake the fame — or the superlatives used to describe him.

Buterin was named the world’s youngest crypto billionaire at age 27 as the crypto market swelled to its peak in 2021. They call him “V God” in China, Time magazine dubbed him crypto royalty in its April 2022 cover story, and he faces mobs of fans desperate for a moment of his attention — and a selfie — virtually anywhere he goes on the planet.

But Buterin isn’t really any of those things.

He isn’t the prince of crypto. He isn’t a cult leader of new gen cypherpunks. He isn’t the wonkiest wonk, or the nerdiest nerd. He regularly gives away his fortune to worthy causes, knocking down his net worth. And he isn’t, according to his own estimation, the be-all and end-all authority on the ethereum network.

He is, however, someone who cares deeply about realizing his vision of a world where, among other things, humans have equitable access to money no matter who they are or where they live.

ETHPrague 2023 was held at Paralelní Polis in the Czech Republic.

Pavel Sinagl

Buterin finds that cryptocurrencies realize their greatest utility in emerging economies — a phenomenon that has gained momentum in recent years.

“The stuff that we often find a bit basic and boring is exactly the stuff that brings lots of value to them right now, like making payments work, and savings,” Buterin said, referring to lower-income countries.

“Just being able to plug into the international economy — these are things that they don’t have, and these are things that provide huge value for people there,” Buterin told CNBC. “It’s hard to even be interested in really abstract stuff like decentralized social media, when you don’t really have those kinds of basics done.”

As U.S. investigators pressed criminal charges against the likes of Sam Bankman-Fried and federal regulators such as the Securities and Exchange Commission began cracking down on what they called the trade of unregistered securities, the action in crypto began to move overseas.

Whereas investors in the U.S. tend to treat crypto as more of a get-rich-quick opportunity and a way to trade on volatility in a less-regulated market than traditional securities, Buterin typically gravitates to developing markets around the world — including Africa, where he traveled in February — where he sees tangible, day-to-day use cases for the technology he helped to build.

When I visited Argentina back at the end of 2021, lots of people use crypto, lots of people love crypto,” he said. “I literally got recognized on the streets of Buenos Aires more often than I got recognized in San Francisco.”

But for crypto to become truly useful on a global scale, Buterin told CNBC, it ultimately has to move out of centralized entities such as custodial trading platforms and it must be simpler to use.

“I found coffee shops without even looking for them that just happened to accept bitcoin and ether — but the problem is, they were all using Binance,” said Buterin.

He said he appreciates centralized exchanges such as Binance for offering a smoother user experience to non-technical people living in countries where the average GDP is less than $10,000 per capita. Nevertheless, he believes that it must become more decentralized.

“Those centralized actors are vulnerable to, you know, both pressure from the outside and to themselves being corrupted,” he said.

Last year, a wave of bankruptcies in the crypto sector exposed grift throughout the industry.

A lot of people got rich before the increase in interest rates and subsequent collapse of Luna in May 2022 set off a chain reaction that sent the entire market tumbling down, spurring a crypto winter that persists to this day. Bankman-Fried, the ex-CEO of now-bankrupt crypto exchange FTX, for example, faces criminal charges alleging that he promulgated a multibillion-dollar fraud scheme. Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange by trading volume, is being sued by both the SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission over a raft of accusations, including the assertion that Binance commingled billions of dollars worth of user funds with its own money.

Instead of placing blind trust in a central intermediary to act in the best interest of the customer, Buterin said, he believes the ideal solution comes down to writing better code so that users can deal directly on-chain.

“We need the experience on-chain to actually be good for regular people to use,” Buterin said.

“We need it to actually be possible to do ethereum payments in a way where the transaction fee is less than five cents a transaction; in a way where the experience doesn’t suck and randomly fail 2.3% of the time; in such a way that you need a Ph.D. in ethereum sciences to actually figure out what’s going on,” he said.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin speaks at ETHPrague 2023, an international conference drawing crypto developers from around the world.

Photo: Pavel Sinagl

Privacy and security are also key priorities.

“People need to have wallets that are actually secure, where if they lose the keys, they’re not going to lose everything,” Buterin added.

A national digital currency could provide the ease of use he envisions, but he believes that decentralization is also critical, otherwise they’ll devolve into another version of the existing banking system — only with more surveillance built in.

“That was a space where I think I had somewhat more hope, probably, naively, five years ago, because there were a lot of people who wanted to do things like make them blockchain friendly, give actual transparency and verifiability guarantees, and some kind of level of actual privacy,” Buterin said, referring to central bank digital currencies, or CBDCs.

CBDCs are a type of blockchain-based virtual currency that is fully regulated and has the backing of a country’s central bank. The People’s Bank of China, which is arguably the leader in CBDCs thus far, has been piloting its take on a CBDC for almost a decade. As of June, transactions using the digital yuan, or e-yuan, hit nearly $250 billion. But as CBDCs catch on, concerns have been raised about financial surveillance and monitoring tools which can be baked into these government-issued digital currencies.

“As each and every one of those projects come to a certain maturity,” Buterin said, the privacy-preserving bits “all sort of fall away as the thing comes closer and closer to being a 1.0. We get systems that are not actually much better than existing payment systems, because they just basically end up being different front-ends for the existing banking system.”

“They end up being even less private and basically break down all of the existing barriers against both corporations and the government at the same time,” he said.

Building a new, brave world

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin speaks at ETHPrague 2023, an international conference drawing crypto developers from around the world.

Photo: Pavel Sinagl

In ethereum circles, hackers are known as BUIDLers — an intentional misspelling of the word “builders” in a sort of homage to the bitcoin meme HODL, or “hold on for dear life.” The meme-off may seem silly, but it gets at the core of what separates these two very different sets of people.

Bitcoiners tend to move more slowly on development, prioritizing security and decentralization above all else, while ethereum programmers tend to be more cavalier. While they aren’t necessarily breaking things as they go, they do move fast and tinker aggressively.

Last year, for example, the ethereum network fundamentally altered the way the blockchain secures its networks and verifies transactions, slashing its energy consumption by more than 99% in the process. Before this upgrade, both the bitcoin and ethereum blockchains had their own vast networks of miners all over the planet running highly specialized computers that crunched math equations in order to validate transactions. Proof-of-work uses a lot of energy, and it is one of the industry’s biggest targets for criticism.

But with the upgrade, ethereum migrated to a system known as proof-of-stake, which swaps out miners for validators. Instead of running large banks of computers, validators leverage their existing cache of ether as a means to verify transactions and mint new tokens. 

Buterin insisted that ethereum’s move to a proof-of-stake model is more likely to stand up against government intervention.

“Proof-of-stake is actually easier to anonymize and harder to shut down than proof-of-work is,” he said. “Proof-of-work requires huge amounts of physical equipment and requires huge amounts of electricity. These are exactly the kinds of things that drug enforcement agencies have decades of experience detecting.”

About the ethereum network, he said, “On the other hand, you’ve got your laptop. You just need a VPN somewhere, and you hide it in a corner. It’s not perfect, but it’s definitely much easier to hide.”

Coder behind the curtain

In previous appearances in Denver and Paris, Buterin’s stage presence was colored with a subtle unease. But one-on-one in Prague, he really came alive, dropping the tics and effortlessly swapping the role of elusive coder for open-minded educator.

His transparent communication style, coupled with his willingness to engage in profound philosophical discussions around concepts such as quadratic funding — a way to crowd-raise a central crypto treasury that is then used to fund public goods projects in ethereum, all with the help of an algorithm designed to optimize spending decisions — and soulbound digital identities on the blockchain have turned him into a trusted thought leader within the crypto community.

Notably, Buterin is also very willing to field any question posed to him — especially those that address critiques of the network and of the scope of his leadership position today.

Take the example of his own outsized role in the cryptocurrency he created. Unlike the pseudonymous and hidden Satoshi Nakamoto, who created bitcoin, Buterin is very much the face of ethereum.

Some see this as a significant point of weakness for the network, because governments could target either Buterin or the Ethereum Foundation. But Buterin rejects those contentions. He said that five years ago a lot more was dependent on him personally and on the foundation, but today, clients — that is, software applications built on top of the blockchain that operate independently — have taken on a lot of the work. Ethereum has become its own self-governing ecosystem, with no single point of failure, he said.

“Even if the foundation got some magic freezing order in every jurisdiction at the same time, and if something happened to me at the same time, there’s entire companies that are sole maintainers of ethereum clients that would totally be able to continue,” explained Buterin.

They call it the philosophy of subtraction.

“I think one of the ways of describing its aim is basically that the Ethereum Foundation isn’t trying to kind of be a zealot, a long-term operator or dominator, or anything like that,” he said. “The goal of the Ethereum Foundation is to foster things that, once they start, can continue in a way that’s totally independent.”

In terms of what’s next for ethereum, Buterin said a big priority is focusing on privacy and scalability through zero-knowledge rollups.

ZK-rollups are transactions bundled into sets and executed off-chain. This layer-two technology plays a major role in future upgrades that will ultimately help to make ethereum faster and cheaper to use.

“There’s definitely an extent to which there are diverging interests and there is the extent to which I think the ecosystem does need to find a way to fight hard for the right to continue to build things with the kinds of privacy that we’ve been used to for thousands of years,” Buterin said.

Clarification: Buterin does not believe he’s been targeted by any countries specifically and does not consider himself an outlaw, but is apprehensive about visiting certain countries because of his work.

Ethereum, Bitcoin communities descend on Prague as U.S. crackdown grips crypto market

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Apple scores big victory with ‘F1,’ but AI is still a major problem in Cupertino

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Apple scores big victory with 'F1,' but AI is still a major problem in Cupertino

Formula One F1 – United States Grand Prix – Circuit of the Americas, Austin, Texas, U.S. – October 23, 2022 Tim Cook waves the chequered flag to the race winner Red Bull’s Max Verstappen 

Mike Segar | Reuters

Apple had two major launches last month. They couldn’t have been more different.

First, Apple revealed some of the artificial intelligence advancements it had been working on in the past year when it released developer versions of its operating systems to muted applause at its annual developer’s conference, WWDC. Then, at the end of the month, Apple hit the red carpet as its first true blockbuster movie, “F1,” debuted to over $155 million — and glowing reviews — in its first weekend.

While “F1” was a victory lap for Apple, highlighting the strength of its long-term outlook, the growth of its services business and its ability to tap into culture, Wall Street’s reaction to the company’s AI announcements at WWDC suggest there’s some trouble underneath the hood.

“F1” showed Apple at its best — in particular, its ability to invest in new, long-term projects. When Apple TV+ launched in 2019, it had only a handful of original shows and one movie, a film festival darling called “Hala” that didn’t even share its box office revenue.

Despite Apple TV+ being written off as a costly side-project, Apple stuck with its plan over the years, expanding its staff and operation in Culver City, California. That allowed the company to build up Hollywood connections, especially for TV shows, and build an entertainment track record. Now, an Apple Original can lead the box office on a summer weekend, the prime season for blockbuster films.

The success of “F1” also highlights Apple’s significant marketing machine and ability to get big-name talent to appear with its leadership. Apple pulled out all the stops to market the movie, including using its Wallet app to send a push notification with a discount for tickets to the film. To promote “F1,” Cook appeared with movie star Brad Pitt at an Apple store in New York and posted a video with actual F1 racer Lewis Hamilton, who was one of the film’s producers.

(L-R) Brad Pitt, Lewis Hamilton, Tim Cook, and Damson Idris attend the World Premiere of “F1: The Movie” in Times Square on June 16, 2025 in New York City.

Jamie Mccarthy | Getty Images Entertainment | Getty Images

Although Apple services chief Eddy Cue said in a recent interview that Apple needs the its film business to be profitable to “continue to do great things,” “F1” isn’t just about the bottom line for the company.

Apple’s Hollywood productions are perhaps the most prominent face of the company’s services business, a profit engine that has been an investor favorite since the iPhone maker started highlighting the division in 2016.

Films will only ever be a small fraction of the services unit, which also includes payments, iCloud subscriptions, magazine bundles, Apple Music, game bundles, warranties, fees related to digital payments and ad sales. Plus, even the biggest box office smashes would be small on Apple’s scale — the company does over $1 billion in sales on average every day.

But movies are the only services component that can get celebrities like Pitt or George Clooney to appear next to an Apple logo — and the success of “F1” means that Apple could do more big popcorn films in the future.

“Nothing breeds success or inspires future investment like a current success,” said Comscore senior media analyst Paul Dergarabedian.

But if “F1” is a sign that Apple’s services business is in full throttle, the company’s AI struggles are a “check engine” light that won’t turn off.

Replacing Siri’s engine

At WWDC last month, Wall Street was eager to hear about the company’s plans for Apple Intelligence, its suite of AI features that it first revealed in 2024. Apple Intelligence, which is a key tenet of the company’s hardware products, had a rollout marred by delays and underwhelming features.

Apple spent most of WWDC going over smaller machine learning features, but did not reveal what investors and consumers increasingly want: A sophisticated Siri that can converse fluidly and get stuff done, like making a restaurant reservation. In the age of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini, the expectation of AI assistants among consumers is growing beyond “Siri, how’s the weather?”

The company had previewed a significantly improved Siri in the summer of 2024, but earlier this year, those features were delayed to sometime in 2026. At WWDC, Apple didn’t offer any updates about the improved Siri beyond that the company was “continuing its work to deliver” the features in the “coming year.” Some observers reduced their expectations for Apple’s AI after the conference.

“Current expectations for Apple Intelligence to kickstart a super upgrade cycle are too high, in our view,” wrote Jefferies analysts this week.

Siri should be an example of how Apple’s ability to improve products and projects over the long-term makes it tough to compete with.

It beat nearly every other voice assistant to market when it first debuted on iPhones in 2011. Fourteen years later, Siri remains essentially the same one-off, rigid, question-and-answer system that struggles with open-ended questions and dates, even after the invention in recent years of sophisticated voice bots based on generative AI technology that can hold a conversation.

Apple’s strongest rivals, including Android parent Google, have done way more to integrate sophisticated AI assistants into their devices than Apple has. And Google doesn’t have the same reflex against collecting data and cloud processing as privacy-obsessed Apple.

Some analysts have said they believe Apple has a few years before the company’s lack of competitive AI features will start to show up in device sales, given the company’s large installed base and high customer loyalty. But Apple can’t get lapped before it re-enters the race, and its former design guru Jony Ive is now working on new hardware with OpenAI, ramping up the pressure in Cupertino.

“The three-year problem, which is within an investment time frame, is that Android is racing ahead,” Needham senior internet analyst Laura Martin said on CNBC this week.

Apple’s services success with projects like “F1” is an example of what the company can do when it sets clear goals in public and then executes them over extended time-frames.

Its AI strategy could use a similar long-term plan, as customers and investors wonder when Apple will fully embrace the technology that has captivated Silicon Valley.

Wall Street’s anxiety over Apple’s AI struggles was evident this week after Bloomberg reported that Apple was considering replacing Siri’s engine with Anthropic or OpenAI’s technology, as opposed to its own foundation models.

The move, if it were to happen, would contradict one of Apple’s most important strategies in the Cook era: Apple wants to own its core technologies, like the touchscreen, processor, modem and maps software, not buy them from suppliers.

Using external technology would be an admission that Apple Foundation Models aren’t good enough yet for what the company wants to do with Siri.

“They’ve fallen farther and farther behind, and they need to supercharge their generative AI efforts” Martin said. “They can’t do that internally.”

Apple might even pay billions for the use of Anthropic’s AI software, according to the Bloomberg report. If Apple were to pay for AI, it would be a reversal from current services deals, like the search deal with Alphabet where the Cupertino company gets paid $20 billion per year to push iPhone traffic to Google Search.

The company didn’t confirm the report and declined comment, but Wall Street welcomed the report and Apple shares rose.

In the world of AI in Silicon Valley, signing bonuses for the kinds of engineers that can develop new models can range up to $100 million, according to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

“I can’t see Apple doing that,” Martin said.

Earlier this week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg sent a memo bragging about hiring 11 AI experts from companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google’s DeepMind. That came after Zuckerberg hired Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang to lead a new AI division as part of a $14.3 billion deal.

Meta’s not the only company to spend hundreds of millions on AI celebrities to get them in the building. Google spent big to hire away the founders of Character.AI, Microsoft got its AI leader by striking a deal with Inflection and Amazon hired the executive team of Adept to bulk up its AI roster.

Apple, on the other hand, hasn’t announced any big AI hires in recent years. While Cook rubs shoulders with Pitt, the actual race may be passing Apple by.

WATCH: Jefferies upgrades Apple to ‘Hold’

Jefferies upgrades Apple to 'Hold'

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Musk backs Sen. Paul’s criticism of Trump’s megabill in first comment since it passed

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Musk backs Sen. Paul's criticism of Trump's megabill in first comment since it passed

Tesla CEO Elon Musk speaks alongside U.S. President Donald Trump to reporters in the Oval Office of the White House on May 30, 2025 in Washington, DC.

Kevin Dietsch | Getty Images

Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who bombarded President Donald Trump‘s signature spending bill for weeks, on Friday made his first comments since the legislation passed.

Musk backed a post on X by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who said the bill’s budget “explodes the deficit” and continues a pattern of “short-term politicking over long-term sustainability.”

The House of Representatives narrowly passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on Thursday, sending it to Trump to sign into law.

Paul and Musk have been vocal opponents of Trump’s tax and spending bill, and repeatedly called out the potential for the spending package to increase the national debt.

On Monday, Musk called it the “DEBT SLAVERY bill.”

The independent Congressional Budget Office has said the bill could add $3.4 trillion to the $36.2 trillion of U.S. debt over the next decade. The White House has labeled the agency as “partisan” and continuously refuted the CBO’s estimates.

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The bill includes trillions of dollars in tax cuts, increased spending for immigration enforcement and large cuts to funding for Medicaid and other programs.

It also cuts tax credits and support for solar and wind energy and electric vehicles, a particularly sore spot for Musk, who has several companies that benefit from the programs.

“I took away his EV Mandate that forced everyone to buy Electric Cars that nobody else wanted (that he knew for months I was going to do!), and he just went CRAZY!” Trump wrote in a social media post in early June as the pair traded insults and threats.

Shares of Tesla plummeted as the feud intensified, with the company losing $152 billion in market cap on June 5 and putting the company below $1 trillion in value. The stock has largely rebounded since, but is still below where it was trading before the ruckus with Trump.

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Tesla one-month stock chart.

— CNBC’s Kevin Breuninger and Erin Doherty contributed to this article.

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Microsoft layoffs hit 830 workers in home state of Washington

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Microsoft layoffs hit 830 workers in home state of Washington

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaks at the Axel Springer building in Berlin on Oct. 17, 2023. He received the annual Axel Springer Award.

Ben Kriemann | Getty Images

Among the thousands of Microsoft employees who lost their jobs in the cutbacks announced this week were 830 staffers in the company’s home state of Washington.

Nearly a dozen game design workers in the state were part of the layoffs, along with three audio designers, two mechanical engineers, one optical engineer and one lab technician, according to a document Microsoft submitted to Washington employment officials.

There were also five individual contributors and one manager at the Microsoft Research division in the cuts, as well as 10 lawyers and six hardware engineers, the document shows.

Microsoft announced plans on Wednesday to eliminate 9,000 jobs, as part of an effort to eliminate redundancy and to encourage employees to focus on more meaningful work by adopting new technologies, a person familiar with the matter told CNBC. The person asked not to be named while discussing private matters.

Scores of Microsoft salespeople and video game developers have since come forward on social media to announce their departure. In April, Microsoft said revenue from Xbox content and services grew 8%, trailing overall growth of 13%.

In sales, the company parted ways with 16 customer success account management staff members based in Washington, 28 in sales strategy enablement and another five in sales compensation. One Washington-based government affairs worker was also laid off.

Microsoft eliminated 17 jobs in cloud solution architecture in the state, according to the document. The company’s fastest revenue growth comes from Azure and other cloud services that customers buy based on usage.

CEO Satya Nadella has not publicly commented on the layoffs, and Microsoft didn’t immediately provide a comment about the cuts in Washington. On a conference call with analysts in April, Microsoft CFO Amy Hood said the company had a “focus on cost efficiencies” during the March quarter.

WATCH: Microsoft layoffs not performance-based, largely targeting middle managers

Microsoft layoffs not performance-based, largely targeting middle managers

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