Airbus has introduced its latest zero-emission eVTOL, designed to carry four people with a noise decibel range lower than a hairdryer when flying – which will radically cut into the noise pollution factor of a futuristic vision of eVTOLs buzzing around busy cities. Nearly five years in the making, this prototype targets a flight range of 50 miles (80 km) and a cruising speed of 75 mph (120 km/h).
Airbus’s latest prototype, the CityAirbus NextGen – unveiled at the opening of its new CityAirbus test center, which will be dedicated to testing systems for eVTOLs, in Donauwörth, Germany – is set to take its maiden flight this year.
The CityAirbus NextGen is an electric lift-plus-cruise vehicle designed for a variety of travel in major cities, including passenger transport, medical services, and ecotourism. Airbus says it will partner with operators and airlines to fly the model worldwide, with plans for it to take flight in Italy, Germany, Norway, and Japan, as well as regions in Latin America.
While at first, the CityAirbus will be flown by a pilot, it’s equipped with an operational automated flight mode that could enable future autonomous flying.
The aircraft, which can reach cruising speeds of 65 knots (about 75 mph) weighs two tons and has a 40-foot wingspan – so it’s by no means a tiny aircraft. It has a V-shaped tail, fixed wings, and a distributed electric propulsion system, with 16 electric power units and eight electric propellers. Back when Airbus introduced the NextGen design in 2021, it promised that these features keep sound levels to below 65 A-weighted decibels (dBA) during fly-over and below 70 dBA during landing – so that’s about the sound of a hairdryer or vacuum cleaner at landing, even less in flight. Perhaps closer to people talking loudly. Of course, Joby Aviation has its own air taxi that is 45.2 dBA when flying overheard, which it says is quieter than a typical conversation.
Electrek’s Take
Airbus is among many companies working on an electric aviation future, including US’s privately held Beta with its sleek CX300, a plane with a 50-foot wingspan, as well as establish players like Boeing and Embraer. In California, the aforementioned Joby Aviation and Archer Aviation, backed by companies like Toyota, Stellantis, and Delta and United Airlines, are both developing battery-powered eVTOLs like Airbus’s. Since today’s batteries can support limited range and weight, these aircraft, for now at least, are designed to just carry a few passengers for short distances, putting their usefulness in competition with helicopters or even trucks for cargo. Of course the costs of producing these aircraft are astronomical to start, so we can just expect a few well-heeled passengers to be ferried around, or for critical services like medical evacuations on the immediate horizon, with the promise of a broader future on the horizon.
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In the Electrek Podcast, we discuss the most popular news in the world of sustainable transport and energy. In this week’s episode, we discuss Trump’s Big Beautiful bill becoming law and going after EVs and solar, Tesla, Ford, and GM EV sales, Electrek Formula Sun, and more
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A new Tesla prototype was spotted again, reigniting speculation among Tesla shareholders, even though it’s likely just a Model Y, potentially a bit smaller, and the upcoming stripped-down, cheaper version.
It sparked a lot of speculation about it being the new “affordable” compact Tesla vehicle.
There’s confusion in the Tesla community around Tesla’s upcoming “affordable” vehicles because CEO Elon Musk falsely denied a report last year about Tesla’s “$25,000” EV model being canceled.
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The facts are that Musk canceled two cheaper vehicles that Tesla was working on, commonly referred as “the $25,000 Tesla” in early 2024. Those vehicles were codenamed NV91 and NV92, and they were based on the new vehicle platform that Tesla is now reserving for the Cybercab.
Instead, Musk noticed that Tesla’s Model 3 and Model Y production lines were starting to be underutilized as the Company faced demand issues. Therefore, Tesla canceled the vehicles program based on the new platform and decided to build new vehicles on Model 3/Y platform using the same production lines.
We previously reported that these electric vehicles will likely look very similar to Model 3 and Model Y.
In recent months, several other media reports reinforced this, and Tesla all but confirmed it during its latest earnings call, when it stated that it is “limited in how different vehicles can be when built on the same production lines.”
Now, the same Tesla prototype has been spotted over the last few days, and it sent the Tesla shareholders community into a frenzy of speculations:
Electrek’s Take
As we have repeatedly reported over the last year, the new “affordable” Tesla “models” coming are basically only stripped-down Model 3 and Model Y vehicles.
They might end up being a little smaller by a few inches, and Tesla may use different model names, but they will be extremely similar.
If this is it, which is possible, you can see it looks almost exactly like a Model Y.
It’s hard to confirm if it’s indeed smaller because of the angle of the vehicle compared to the other Model Ys, but it’s not impossible that the wheelbase is a bit smaller – although it’s hard to confirm.
Either way, the most significant changes for these stripped-down, more affordable “models” are expected to be cheaper interior materials, like textile seats instead of vegan leather, no heated or ventilated seats standard, no rear screen, maybe even no double-panned acoustic glass and a lesser audio system.
As previously stated, the real goal of these new variants, or models, is to lower the average sale price in order to combat decreasing demand and maintain or increase the utilization rate of Tesla’s current production lines, which have been throttled down in the last few years to now about 60% utilization.
If this trend continues, Tesla would find itself in trouble and may even have to close its factories.
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CANNES — Wall Street’s new plumbing is being built on Ethereum and this week its architects took over the same French Riviera villas and red carpet venues that host the Cannes Film Festival in May.
The Ethereum Community Conference, or EthCC, took over the beachside town that was swarming with crypto founders, developers, and some of the institutional giants now building atop the infrastructure.
The crypto elite climbed the iconic red-carpeted steps of the Palais des Festivals — a cinematic landmark now repurposed as the stage for Ethereum’s flagship European event.
“The atmosphere this year was palpable in Cannes,” said Bettina Boon Falleur, the powerhouse behind EthCC for the past seven years. “The prestige of the location, combined with the quality of talks, has reinforced Ethereum’s stature and purpose in the wider ecosystem.”
Private parties sprawled across cliffside estates and exclusive resorts, but the conversations were less about price action and more about the blockchain’s evolving role as the back-end of global finance.
EthCC, now in its eighth year, has tracked Ethereum’s trajectory from scrappy experiment to institutional backbone.
“That impact was unmistakable this year,” Falleur said. “From Robinhood embracing decentralized finance infrastructure via Arbitrum to local governments like the City of Cannes exploring deeper integration with the crypto economy.”
Indeed, one of the boldest moves came this week from Robinhood, which became the first publicly traded U.S. company to launch tokenized stocks on-chain.
At a product showcase held inside a Belle Époque mansion overlooking the sea, Robinhood unveiled a sweeping new crypto strategy — including the ability for European users to trade tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs via Arbitrum, a Layer 2 network built on Ethereum.
The announcement helped push Robinhood stock past $100 for the first time, capping off a week of fresh all-time highs and a more than 30% rally since being snubbed by the S&P 500 during a recent rebalance.
Inside the Palais des Festivals, ETHCC draws founders, developers, and institutions into the same halls that host the world’s biggest film premieres — this time, for the future of finance.
MacKenzie Sigalos
Ether, the token native to the Ethereum blockchain, was up nearly 6% on the week and several public equities tied to the blockchain have rallied alongside it.
BitMine Immersion Technologies, a company that mines bitcoin, gained more than 1,200% since announcing it would make ether its primary treasury reserve asset. Bit Digital, which recently exited bitcoin mining to “become a pure play” ethereum staking and treasury company, gained more than 34% this week. And SharpLink Gaming, which added more than $20 million in ether to its balance sheet this week, jumped more than 28% on Thursday.
Ether ETF inflows are rising again too — a sign that institutional investors are warming back up.
Ether is still down more than 20% this year and lags far behind bitcoin in market cap and adoption. But funds tracking ETH have seen two straight months of mostly net inflows, according to CoinGlass data. Still, ether ETFs total just $11 billion — compared to $138 billion in bitcoin ETFs.
Institutions aren’t betting on Ethereum for hype — they’re betting on infrastructure.
Even as prices stall and the network faces headwinds from slower base layer revenues and faster rivals like Solana, the momentum is shifting toward utility.
“Ethereum is getting plugged into these core transactional systems,” Paul Brody, global blockchain leader at EY, told CNBC on the sidelines of EthCC. “Investors, savers, people moving money — they are going to start shifting from some of the older mechanisms of doing this into Ethereum ecosystems that can do these transactions faster, cheaper, but also very importantly, with significant new functionality attached to it.”
Crypto founders and developers climb the iconic red-carpeted steps of the Palais des Festivals — a familiar backdrop for the Cannes Film Festival, now repurposed for Ethereum’s flagship European event.
MacKenzie Sigalos
Deutsche Bank recently announced it’s building a tokenization platform on zkSync — a faster, cheaper blockchain built on top of Ethereum — to help asset managers issue and manage tokenized funds, stablecoins, and other real-world assets while meeting regulatory and data protection requirements.
Coinbase and Kraken are also racing to own the crossover between traditional stocks and crypto.
Coinbase has filed with the SEC to offer trading in tokenized public equities, a move that would diversify its revenue stream and bring it into more direct competition with brokerages like Robinhood and eToro.
Kraken announced plans to offer 24/7 trading of U.S. stock tokens in select overseas markets.
BlackRock‘s tokenized money market fund, BUIDL — launched on Ethereum last year — offers qualified investors on-chain access to yield with redemptions settled in USDC in real time.
Stablecoins, meanwhile, continue to serve as the backbone of Ethereum’s financial layer.
“The builders and contributors at EthCC aren’t chasing the next bull run,” Falleur said, “they’re laying the groundwork to make Ethereum home for the next billion users.”
Even as newer blockchains tout faster speeds and lower fees, Ethereum is proving its staying power as a trusted network.
Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s co-founder, told CNBC in Cannes that there is an assumption that institutions only care about scale and speed — but in practice, it’s the opposite.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin delivers a keynote at ETHCC, laying out the network’s next steps — and its values test — as institutional adoption accelerates.
EthCC
“A lot of institutions basically tell us to our faces that they value Ethereum because it’s stable and dependable, because it doesn’t go down,” he said.
Buterin added that firms often ask about privacy and other long-term features — the kinds of concerns that institutions, he said, “really value.”
Tomasz Stańczak, the new co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, said institutions are choosing Ethereum for the same core reasons.
“Ten years without stopping for a moment. Ten years of upgrades, with a huge dedication to security and censorship resistance,” he said.
He added that when institutions send orders to the market, they want to be “absolutely sure that their order is treated fairly, that nobody has preference, that the transaction actually is executed at the time when it’s delivered.”
Those guarantees have become increasingly valuable as stablecoins and tokenized assets move into the mainstream.
Ethereum’s core values — neutrality, security, and censorship resistance — are emerging as competitive advantages.
The real test now is whether Ethereum can scale without losing its values.
“We don’t just want to succeed,” Buterin said from the mainstage of the Palais this week. “We want to be something that is worthy of succeeding.”
He said the hope is that future generations will look back and see a network that truly delivered openness, freedom, and permissionless access to the masses.
White-clad guests dance poolside at the rAAVE party in Cannes.
MacKenzie Sigalos
But the week didn’t end in the conference halls, it closed with tradition. On the balcony of Villa Montana, overlooking the Bay of Cannes, the rAAVE party lit up.
White-clad guests sipped cocktails as the DJ spun by the pool, haze curling from smoke machines.
This year, Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov and DeFi icon Stani Kulechov, founder of Aave, stood atop the balcony overlooking the crowd and the light-dotted skyline of Cannes.
It was a fitting snapshot of the momentum behind Ethereum’s institutional rise and symbolic of Web3’s shift from niche experiment to financial mainstay.