Ethereum turns 10: From scrappy experiment to Wall Street’s invisible backbone
CANNES — Ten years ago, Vitalik Buterin and a small band of developers huddled in a drafty Berlin loft strung with dangling lightbulbs, laptops balanced on mismatched chairs and chipped tables. They weren’t corporate titans or venture-backed founders — just idealists working long nights to push a radical idea into reality.
From that sparse office, they launched “Frontier,” Ethereum‘s first live network. It was bare-bones — no interface, no polish, nothing user-friendly. But it could mine, execute smart contracts, and let developers test decentralized applications. It was the spark that transformed Ethereum from an abstract concept into a living, breathing system.
Bitcoin had captured headlines as “digital gold,” but what they built was something else entirely: programmable money, a financial operating system where code could move funds, enforce contracts, and create businesses without banks or brokers.
One year earlier and 520 miles away in Zurich, Paul Brody got a call from IBM security: A kid was wandering the lab unattended.
“That’s not a child,” Brody told them. “That’s Vitalik. He’s a grown-up — he just looks really young.”
Paul Brody and Vitalik Buterin with IBM and Samsung executives at CES 2015, where IBM unveiled its first blockchain prototype built on Ethereum’s early code.
Paul Brody
At the time, Buterin was building the bones of Ethereum. The blockchain was still in its alpha stage, an early version of what would become a $420 billion platform rewiring Wall Street and powering decentralized finance, NFTs, and tokenized markets across the globe.
Brody, then leading a research team at IBM, remembers how quickly the idea clicked.
“One of the guys on the research team came to me and said, ‘I’ve met this really interesting guy. He’s got a really cool idea…It’s like a version of bitcoin, but we’re going to make it much faster and programmable,'” he said. “And when he said that to me, I thought, ‘That’s it. That is what I want. That is what we need.'”
With Buterin’s help, IBM built its first blockchain prototype on Ethereum’s early code, unveiling it at CES in 2015 alongside Samsung. “That was how I ended up down this path,” Brody said. “I was done with all other technology and basically made the switch to blockchain.”
Even now, as EY’s global blockchain leader, Brody remembers feeling a pang of envy. “This is a kid, and it doesn’t matter,” he said. “I was jealous of Vitalik… to be able to do that.”
He added, “I don’t think opportunities like that could have been surfaced when I was that age.”
Now, a decade later, that experiment has quietly rewired global markets.
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
“It’s very impressive, just how much the space has succeeded and grown into, beyond pretty much anyone’s expectations,” Buterin told CNBC in Cannes on the sidelines of the blockchain’s flagship event in Europe.
Buterin said the change over the past decade has been staggering. Ten years ago, he recalled, the crypto community was “just a very small space,” with only a handful of people working on bitcoin and a few other projects.
Since then, Ethereum has become “this big thing,” Buterin reflected, with major corporations now launching assets on both its base layer and layer-two networks. Parts of national economies are beginning to run on Ethereum infrastructure, a far cry from its cypherpunk origins.
But Buterin warned that mainstream adoption brings risks as well as benefits. One concern is that if too few issuers or intermediaries dominate, they could become “de facto controllers of the ecosystem.” He described a scenario where Ethereum might appear open, but, in practice, all the keys are managed by centralized providers.
“That’s the thing that we don’t want,” he said.
Prague to the Riviera
Two years earlier in Prague, CNBC met Buterin at Paralelní Polis, a sprawling industrial complex turned anarchist tech hub in the city’s Holešovice district. The building’s labyrinthine staircases and shadowed corridors felt like a physical map of the crypto world itself — part resistance movement, part experiment in reimagining power.
It was a place built on Václav Benda’s concept of a “parallel society,” where decentralized technologies offered refuge from state surveillance and control. It’s the kind of place where Buterin, a self-described nomad, found himself at home among cypherpunks and cryptographic idealists.
At the time, Buterin described crypto’s greatest utility not in speculative trading, but in helping people survive broken financial systems in emerging markets.
ETHPrague 2023 was held at Paralelní Polis in the Czech Republic.
Pavel Sinagl
“The stuff that we often find a bit basic and boring is exactly the stuff that brings lots of value,” he told CNBC at the time. “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.”
Even in Prague, where coders worked to make payments fast and censorship-resistant, the technology felt like a resistance movement — privacy-preserving, anti-authoritarian, a lifeline in countries where banking collapses were common and money couldn’t be trusted.
This year, Buterin keynoted Ethereum’s flagship conference at the Palais des Festivals — the same red carpet venue that hosts movie stars each spring.
It was a fitting symbol of Ethereum’s journey: from underground hacker dens to a network that governments, banks, and brokerages are now racing to build upon.
Brody, who currently leads blockchain strategy at EY, says what matters most is how deeply Ethereum is integrating into traditional finance. “The global financial system is really nicely described as a whole network of pipes,” he said.
“What’s happening now is that Ethereum is getting plumbed into this infrastructure,” Brody continued, noting that until recently, crypto operated on entirely separate rails from traditional finance.
Now, he said, Ethereum is being wired directly into core transaction systems, setting the stage for massive financial flows — from investors to everyday savers — to migrate away from older mechanisms toward Ethereum-based platforms that can move money faster, at lower cost, and with more advanced functionality than legacy systems allow.
Becoming the plumbing of Wall Street
Stablecoins — digital dollars that live on Ethereum — power trillions in payments, tokenized assets and funds are moving on-chain, and Robinhood recently rolled out tokenized U.S. equities via Arbitrum, an Ethereum-based layer two.
Circle’s USDC — the second-largest stablecoin — still settles around 65% of its volume on Ethereum’s rails. According to CoinGecko’s latest “State of Stablecoins” report, Ethereum accounts for nearly 50% of all stablecoin activity.
Between Circle’s IPO and the stablecoin-focused GENIUS Act, now signed into law by President Donald Trump, regulators have new reason to engage with, rather than fight, this transformation.
Data from Deutsche Bank shows stablecoin transactions hit $28 trillion last year — more than Mastercard and Visa combined. The bank itself has announced plans to build a tokenization platform on zkSync, a fast, cost-efficient Ethereum layer two designed to help asset managers issue and manage tokenized funds, stablecoins, and other real-world assets while meeting regulatory and data protection requirements.
Digital asset exchanges like Coinbase and Kraken are racing to capture this crossover between traditional securities and crypto.
As part of its quarterly earnings release, Coinbase said this week it’s launching tokenized stocks and prediction markets for U.S. users in the coming months, 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, offering qualified investors on-chain access to yield with real-time redemptions settled in USDC.
Even as newer blockchains tout faster speeds and lower fees, Ethereum has proven its staying power as the trusted network for global finance. Buterin told CNBC in Cannes that there’s a misconception about what institutions actually want.
“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.
He added that firms frequently ask about privacy and other long-term features — the kinds of concerns that institutions, he said, “really value.”
Institutions are choosing various layer twos to meet specific needs — Robinhood uses Arbitrum, Deutsche Bank zkSync, Coinbase and Kraken Optimism — but they all ultimately settle on Ethereum’s base layer.
“The value proposition of Ethereum is its global reach, its huge capital flows, its incredible programmability,” Brody said.
He added that the fact it isn’t the fastest blockchain or the one with the quickest settlement times “is secondary to the fact that it’s overall the most widely adopted and flexible system.”
Brody also believes history points toward consolidation. He said that in most technology standards wars, one platform ultimately dominates. In his view, Ethereum is likely to become that dominant programmability layer, while Bitcoin plays a complementary role as a risk-off, scarcity-driven asset.
Engineers, he said, “love to work on a standard… to scale on a standard,” and Ethereum has become precisely that.
Tomasz Stańczak, the newly appointed co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, in Cannes for Europe’s largest annual gathering for the blockchain.
MacKenzie Sigalos
Tomasz Stańczak, the newly appointed co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, sees the same pattern from inside the ecosystem.
“Institutions choose Ethereum over and over again for its values,” Stańczak said. “Ten years without stopping for a moment. Ten years of upgrades with a huge dedication to security and censorship resistance.”
When institutions send an order to the market, they want to be sure that it’s treated fairly, that nobody has preference, and that the transaction is executed at the time when it’s delivered. “That’s what Ethereum guarantees,” added Stańczak.
Those assurances have become more valuable as traditional finance moves on-chain.
Scaling without losing its soul
Ethereum’s path hasn’t been smooth. The network has weathered spectacular booms and busts, rivals promising faster speeds, and criticism that it’s too slow or expensive for mass adoption. Yet it has outlasted nearly all early competitors.
In 2022, Ethereum replaced its old transaction validation method, proof-of-work — where armies of computers competed to solve puzzles — with proof-of-stake, where users lock up their ether as collateral to help secure the network. The shift cut Ethereum’s energy use by more than 99% and set the stage for upgrades aimed at making apps faster and cheaper to run on its base layer.
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
The next decade will test whether Ethereum can scale without compromise.
Buterin said the first priority is getting Ethereum to “the finish line” in terms of its technical goals. That means improving scalability and speed without sacrificing its core principles of decentralization and security — and ideally making those properties even stronger.
Zero-knowledge proofs, for example, could dramatically increase transaction capacity while making it possible to verify that the chain is following the rules of the protocol on something as small as a smartwatch.
There are also algorithmic changes the team already knows are needed to protect Ethereum against large-scale computing attacks. Implementing those, Buterin said, is part of the path to making Ethereum “a really valuable part of global infrastructure that helps make the internet and the economy a more free and open place.”
Buterin believes the real change won’t come with fireworks. He said it may already be unfolding years before most people recognize it.
“This type of disruption doesn’t feel like overturning the existing system,” he said. “It feels like building a new thing that just keeps growing and growing until eventually more and more people realize you don’t even have to look at the old thing if you didn’t want to.”
Brody can already see hints of that future. Wire transfers are moving on-chain, assets like stocks and real estate are being tokenized, and eventually, he said, businesses will run entire contracts — the money, the products, the terms and conditions — automatically on a single, shared infrastructure.
That shift, Brody added, won’t simply copy old financial systems onto new technology.
“One of the lessons from technology adoption is that it’s not that we replace like for like,” he said. “When new things come along, we tend to build on a new technology infrastructure. My key hypothesis is that as we build new financial products, it will be attractive to build them on blockchain rails — and we’ll try to do things on blockchain rails that we can’t do today.”
If Brody and Buterin are right, the real disruption won’t make headlines. It’ll simply become the way money moves, unseen and unstoppable.
WATCH: Robinhood hits record high as OpenAI, SpaceX go on-chain
New filings have revealed that BYD is about to release a ridiculous 3,000 hp electric supercar: the Yangwang U9 Track Edition.
BYD already shocked the world when it launched the Yangwang U9, its first all-electric supercar.
It featured four advanced electric motors with a combined power of nearly 1,300 horsepower. The U9 can accelerate from 0 to 62 mph (0 to 100 km/h) in just 2.36 seconds.
With a motor at each wheel and a highly advanced electric-air suspension, the U9 can turn on itself and even jump over potholes.
But that was only the beginning.
Based on a new filing with the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), BYD is preparing to launch a new ‘Track Edition’ of the Yangwang U9:
When an automaker releases a “track” version of a car, it typically primarily features body changes for better aerodynamic performance, adding downforce, and it will also often feature bigger brakes.
The Yangwang U9 ‘Track Edition’ appears to feature all that… and much more.
The filing reveals that BYD updated the motors at each wheel to a new 555 kW motor. That’s a higher-performing motor than in most performance electric vehicles. The U9 Track Edition has four of them for a total of 2,220 kW (3,019 hp).
I would have thought that this was a typo if it wasn’t for the insane electric vehicles coming out of China these days.
Here are a few pictures from the MIIT filing:
There are a lot of performance specs that are not included in the MIIT filing. Therefore, it will be interesting to see when the vehicle is fully unveiled and BYD reveals what kind of performance it can achieve with 3,000 hp packed in 4 electric motors.
Here are a few other features mentioned in the filing:
Standard features:
- 20-inch wheels with 325/35 R20 tyres
- Carbon-fibre roof
- Large fixed carbon-fibre rear wing
- Rear diffuser with adjustable blades for aerodynamic optimisation
Optional aerodynamic parts:
- Standard or enhanced carbon-fibre front splitter
- Electric rear wing
Electrek’s Take
How are they going to keep that thing from flying away? Seriously.
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The eBike space is crowded in 2025, but the Kingbull Jumper Go stands out with a rare combination of features: a compact 20” frame, full suspension, a step-through design, and a powerful Class 3 motor capable of hitting high speeds. Whether you’re commuting through the city, riding off-road trails, or just looking for a versatile, approachable ride, the Jumper Go delivers serious performance, especially for the price.
Key specs
On paper, the Kingbull Jumper Go has all the hardware you would want and need for its size and price. It blends commuter-friendly features with the components you’d expect from more premium off-road eBikes. These specs on paper translate to real-world use amazingly. Here’s a quick rundown of the key specs:
- Motor: 750W Bafang rear hub motor
- Top Speed: 28 MPH with pedal assist (up to 40 MPH unlocked; check local laws)
- Battery: 48V 20Ah Samsung removable battery
- Max Range: Up to 80 miles per charge
- Gearing: Shimano 8-speed drivetrain
- Brakes: Tektro hydraulic disc brakes
- Suspension: Front 80mm fork + rear mid-frame air shock
- Tires: 20” x 4.0” Kenda fat tires (puncture-resistant)
- Frame: Step-through aluminum frame with internal cable routing
- Display: Integrated LED display with speed, assist level, and battery status
- Lighting: Integrated 48V headlight and rear brake light
- Included Accessories: Rear cargo rack, full fenders, mini tool kit, zip ties, tire pump
Together, these features make the Kingbull Jumper Go a rare all-in-one package: powerful, approachable, and ready to handle daily commutes and adventures without compromise.
Real-world experience
I have been living with the Kingbull Jumper Go for two weeks now and have been using it as my daily driver. I have used it for pretty much everything, from small grocery runs, to running a quick errand, to just taking me from place to place. Here is what you need to know.
The setup
The setup was surprisingly simple. The bike has everything needed for assembly, including a mini tool kit, zip ties, and even a tire pump. The Kingbull Jumper Go comes about 80% pre-assembled, with the rear tire and monitor intact. I had to install the front tire, front fender, handlebar, headlight, and seat. Assembly took roughly 20 minutes, and I am someone who does not do this often. It was great that I did not need any of my own tools to get the bike ready. The final thing I did was ensure it was fully charged before getting on it.
The ride
On the road, the 750W motor gives you quick acceleration and plenty of torque, easily handling hills and the urban terrain I live in. The five levels of pedal assist and throttle control give you full flexibility in how much effort you want to put in. I got the bike to almost 30mph with the pedal assist and to 22mph using the throttle. The suspension system, which features an 80mm front fork and a rear mid-air shock, makes city potholes and light off-road trails smooth and manageable.
I live in New Jersey, and if you know anything about our roads, they are terribly maintained and have potholes everywhere. The Kingbull Jumper Go kept the ride very smooth and managed those potholes perfectly. I also took it through some gravel roads, trails, and through some wet terrain, and it was great. The fat tires gives you a strong sense of confidence both on road and when you are dealing with a more challenging terrain.
The design
The step-through frame is especially helpful for beginners and for riders who are sharing this bike with someone who is a different height. The step-through frame also makes it easy to dismount or quickly react by easily putting your feet down without feeling like you are going to tip over.
The 20” Kenda fat tires provide great traction and comfort on surfaces ranging from pavement to grass and gravel. The Tektro hydraulic brakes are responsive and reliable, offering solid control even at higher speeds. You also get a fantastic LED display with real-time speed, distance traveled, and battery life. It is also plenty bright, so the display is easily visible even in the brightest conditions.
After riding this for two weeks in both urban and off-road settings, the Kingbull Jumper Go proved to be equally capable as a commuter eBike, urban cruiser, and all-terrain bike. Its compact frame makes it easier to handle and store compared to larger full-size fat-tire bikes, but without compromising on performance.
Kingbull Jumper Go Pricing and availability
The Kingbull Jumper Go is currently available through Kingbull’s official website for just under $1,699. However, they have a limited-time summer promotion offering $100 OFF with code Electrek, bringing the price down to $1,599. That discount makes it one of the best values on the market for a full-suspension, Class 3 fat-tire eBike. Kingbull’s 2-year warranty also backs it and offers local test ride availability in California, giving potential buyers added peace of mind and confidence in the brand.
Check out the Kingbull Jumper Go today!
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Yep, I did it again. I bought something weird and crazy from China. It’s a mini electric jet boat. “What’s a mini electric jet boat?” you might be asking. Think: comically small one-seater boat with an electrically powered jet ski drivetrain.
Basically, I plopped down a not insignificant amount of money online and then crossed my fingers. Here’s what happened next.
Firstly, this is kind of par for the course for me. If you’ve been following my writing for any significant period of time, you’ll have learned two things about me. I like e-bikes and I like buying weird electric vehicles from China that I don’t need. It’s a problem, I know. I’m going to get help one day. But that day is not today.
Because today I’ve got a new electric jet boat. You can see my unboxing and testing video of this aquatic miracle here, or keep reading below for the full story of how this happened.
So here’s how it went. I’ve spent years writing a mostly-weekly column on the fun and weird Alibaba electric vehicles I find in my time-wasting window-shopping searches. A couple of years ago, one of them was a mini electric jet boat. And I’ve wanted one ever since.
So I started researching factories in China that build these things and talked to a number of them. Some seemed fairly new. Others seemed like fronts or merely trading companies. And they all seemed pretty shady. But this isn’t my first rodeo and so I chose the one that seemed the least risky and started talking details. I use a Chinese messaging service similar to WhatsApp that makes it a lot easier to communicate with the factories, and the lovely girl who works their sales office showed me several models and features. Together, we worked through the details and specs until I had planned out basically what I wanted.
Then it came time to pay.
This is always the scariest part and so I wired to China more money than a bad idea should cost. Over there, it’s common to do a 30% down payment and 70% balance payment upon completion, so that’s what I offered. I’m glad I did because production took several months longer than I expected, and I was starting to get worried, but fortunately, the factory was sending me fairly regular pictures and video updates of progress, which was comforting. After a few months, my order was finally ready, and so they packaged it up and shipped it off to me.
I should also mention that while I normally use FOB (free on board) or CIF (cost, insurance, freight) terms for these kinds of deals where I get some new toy in from China, this particular case was a bit riskier, and so I went with DDP (delivered duty paid) terms. The two former options leave most of the work on me to ship and import the thing, while the last option means the seller basically handles everything until there’s a janky wooden crate dropped in my driveway. DDP terms are always more expensive, and many factories don’t want to mess with it since it leaves most of the work of shipping and importing on the seller or their freight forwarder, which I preferred in this case.
This was also before all the new Trump tariffs this year, and so duties were much lower (somewhere around 27-28% total, I believe. Now they are probably 2-3x that much).
But with all of the work of actually dealing with getting the thing now finished, it was time to crack open the box. Inside was my shiny blue electric jet boat! I had it shipped to my parents’ place in Florida because they have a decently large pond where I could test it. There I got it open and hauled it back to the pond in what else but my electric mini truck that I bought from China nearly four years ago. It has since lived a loving but not easy life as a farm truck, and this isn’t even one of the weirdest things that has graced its bed in the last few years.
The little boat is so small that it actually fits nicely in the little bed of my mini-truck, and it was a great example of why I even wanted this thing to begin with: it’s small enough to fit in a car, so you can take it to the lake or ocean without needing a boat trailer.
Even a jet-ski needs a trailer, but you could take this little vessel to the shore with a kayak rack on your Tesla, or even on a decent car! Just kidding, I don’t even own a car… unless you count that mini-truck that I gave to my parents.
At the pond I dropped the boat down onto the grass, dragged it the last bit of the way down the bank and splashed it right into the drink. From there, I just needed to plop the 5 kWh LiFePO4 battery into the underseat compartment and I was ready to go.
There were no instructions, so it took me a couple of minutes to figure out the right combination of buttons to push and key turns to actually start it up, but from the first push of the accelerator, I knew this thing was wild!
It was supposed to be just over 30 mph capable (50 km/h or 27 knots), but the pond is only around 300 feet long and so the opposite bank comes at you mighty fast. I think I only got it up to around half its top speed because 1) I didn’t want to run aground, and 2) I was legitimately scared to go faster.
The boat comes with these weird stainless steel mounts on the side, and it turns out they are for this ridiculous looking inflatable bumper thing that reminds me of a big toilet seat. I didn’t install it because I hate how it ruins the sleek look of the boat. But I instantly discovered why they designed it, since the jet boat feels horribly unstable at slow speeds. As soon as you turn sharply and let off the throttle at slow speeds, you start heeling over significantly. It’s a very uncomfortable feeling since you’re sitting at the water line and feel like you’re going to be thrown out of the boat. The ballast of the huge battery sitting so low, plus whatever actual ballast they build into these things, probably means you won’t really capsize. But it sure feels like you’re going for a swim soon.
Turning at speed is much nicer, but if you’re not yet planing (going fast enough to rise out of the water and glide over the surface instead of just floating due to water displacement), it just feels like you’re going to rock yourself right out in a turn. The boat was obviously designed to handle at high speeds, not low speeds. It doesn’t have the wide beam of a jet ski for stability, so that inflatable toilet seat gives it low-speed stability.
But alas, I just couldn’t bring myself to install the nautical version of training wheels on that beautiful thing, so I pushed through it and just kept it at fairly high speeds in the pond. It was a blast, and with my dad there watching me, I was excited to give him a turn too.
Oh, I forgot to mention, I actually bought two of them.
With my dad’s boat unboxed, we both got in our own mini jet boats and had a blast ripping high-speed loops around his backyard pond.
These things are insanely powerful for what feels like a stubby kayak when you sit inside it, and the performance gives you an ear to grin.
Just be prepared for your face to turn to terror the first time you let off the throttle too abruptly and take a sharp turn.
As fun as they were though, we still weren’t even past half way down on the accelerator pedal, and so I knew that a larger body of water was going to be in our future.
These are motorized vessels and so they require registration to use them in public waterways in most states. It’s not like a kayak or canoe where you can just put in anywhere and pretty much be alright with the law. And in Florida, where the state makes a lot of its money from its waterways, they actually enforce this stuff.
I imagine I can get the boats properly registered with hull numbers for use in public waterways, but for expediency’s sake, I set my sights on a big private lake in a local eco-friendly planned community. The cool thing is that these huge lakes are off-limits to combustion engine watercraft, which means they’re basically only for kayakers and canoers, or the rare person who has an electric boat.
I’m a rare person.
So with the entire lake empty, I brought my jet boat over in the back of my family’s car and put in at the kayak dock.
If you watched my video above, you’ll already know how that went (complete with Beach Boys-style song montage). But for those who prefer to read instead of watching an awesome little jet boat rocket around a big lake, just know that it was an absolute riot. The mini electric jet boat is insanely fast and skipped the glassy surface of the pond like a pebble with a rocket engine on it.
Of course, the surface didn’t stay glassy long with the massive wake I was sending out, and that meant soon I was getting airborne, hopping my own wake while pulling tight figure eights.
With around 25 minutes of boating and filming, I had dropped the battery from 100% to 70%. Despite the high power, that big battery was impressively lasting!
The whole experience proved to me how right I was about the convenience of this boat format. This whole exploit was simple, a word that is almost never used when discussing boat ownership. To get to the water, I simply loaded the boat in the back of the car and then used a cheap Amazon kayak trailer to waddle it the 100 feet or so from the parking lot to the dock. The boat is still quite heavy – I’d guess at least 150 lb (70 kg) or so. But lifting one side at a time is doable by one dude, and the kayak trailer made it easy enough to move on my own across land.
There was no boat trailer necessary. No searching for a boat ramp. No hoping to stay off of Miami Boat Ramp YouTube channels lampooning people who don’t know what they’re doing with a trailer, etc. It was the boating experience of a jet-ski meets the ownership experience of a kayak.
For anyone who lives along the water, this would be an amazing toy to own. There are so many people with lakefront property who could have their own mini electric boat to tool around on whenever they want. Or if you live close to the coast, you could keep the boat in the garage with a kayak hoist and just drive it on down to the coast for fun. These things practically sell themselves. Cheaper than an electric surfboard and nearly as portable.
Which brings me to cost. I ended up paying around $5,500 for each boat, which is a lot to risk on this stuff, with only a hope that it would work out and that I could make some of the money back on my video and writing. And if you’re thinking, “Wow, this guy plopped down $11k on this stuff,” then I have two things to tell you. First, a Jet Ski would have cost more and been a huge hassle. And two, I didn’t spend $11k; I spent a lot more.
In fact, I couldn’t stop myself at the time (and considered it something of a business expense – hey, I’m working right now, people!), so it turns out that I actually bought three of these things. I know this sounds like an excuse, but it just made sense with how much shipping was already costing me! I mean, c’mon – I couldn’t afford not to.
Though I still have the third one in the crate and I’ll probably end up selling it new in box, if someone wants to find my email and make me an offer.
That also means I have two boats that I plan to keep, and I need names for them. Please hit me with your suggestions in the comment section. One of my subscribers suggested an absolute banger of a name with Sunny Side Up for my yellow and white solar-powered Chinese electric pleasure boat, and that’s what I went with.
Now I will say that as fun as these things are, they aren’t perfect. One of the boats arrived with its bilge pump motor always running due to a faulty float switch (oh yeah, they even have a bilge pump!). The factory also told me that they couldn’t install real cleats through the hull, though at least they did give me a bow eye that helps with tying it up.
I’ve technically been sitting on this story for a year, and I can tell you that after a year of living out in the Florida elements, one of the boat’s paint is a bit cracked near the hinges of the seat where it gets stressed from lifting the seat up to remove the battery.
The boats are also surprisingly loud. These are the loudest EVs I’ve ever seen, and I thought the F-150 Lightning was loud! A neighbor has one and I once remarked that it sounded like a jet turbine in the summer because of all its fans running, but now I know what an EV with an actual jet turbine sounds like, or at least a water jet turbine. To be more accurate, it’s not the boat that’s loud, but rather the cavitating water inside the jet turbine that is constantly screaming as its vacuum cavities repeatedly expand and collapse as they shoot out the back of the boat’s vectored thrust nozzle. It sounds like a wet, angry bat out of hell. A guy watching me from the shore of the lake actually asked if it was a two-stroke! So don’t think this is going to be a silent boat. The motor is silent, but the shooting water is loud.
Then there’s the battery. It weighs nearly 80 pounds and you have to pull the battery out to charge it – you can’t leave it in the boat and charge it since the charge and discharge port are one and the same.
I also burned out one of the chargers when I accidentally let the charger tip fall on some wet grass while it was plugged in. Poof. The magic smoke was out of the charger, and it wasn’t going back in. I’ll have to find another 84V charger and solder this massive and unique charging connector onto its output wire.
Speaking of the chargers, they are 2,500-watt chargers. They’ll impressively fill the batteries in just over two hours, but they are so powerful that they won’t run on any normal household 120V outlet. I got lucky that my dad’s garage had an RV outlet with a 30A breaker; otherwise, I wouldn’t have been able to use the charger.
But downsides aside, the rest of the experience was incredible! I love these things! They’re just so much fun, and they bring a smile to everyone’s face. Since I bought them a year ago, I’m seeing many more options on Alibaba for other factories starting to make and sell mini jet boats. I can all but guarantee you that within a year or two, there will be people re-selling mini jet boats in the US. Just make sure you go with a reputable company that has done its homework and can stand behind these things. A couple of years ago, I started an electric tractor company based on making a long list of improvements to what was originally a German-designed and Chinese-produced electric loader. We developed it (and subsequent models) into our own new design, offer full warranties, and keep a US warehouse stocked with replacement parts. That’s the only way to do business right, so don’t get hosed a few months from now by some fly-by-night company that read this article and then thought it would be a good idea to start hawking Chinese mini jet boats in the US. These things are quite rough around the edges (literally and figuratively) and would take some significant work to make them safe and reliable for a Western market.
And in the same vein, I don’t actually recommend anyone try and buy one of these from China, either. There’s just too much risk and too big a chance that you’ll get ripped off in the end, or you’ll get bent over a shipping container by customs and end up paying several times the purchase price in shipping and import fees.
I don’t have any plans to import and sell these, largely because of the liability (imagine how much I pay in business liability insurance just to run a tractor company) and the fact that there are too many design changes I’d need to make to turn it into something I’d be proud to stand behind and put my name on. I mostly go on these real-life Alibaba escapades because 1) I enjoy testing the weird and fun things you can find in a country that has certain product safety and manufacturing advantages compared to the West (i.e. less of the first and more of the second), and 2) so that I can share these experiences with my audience, most of whom will never have the ability to try these things themselves.
But hey, as a neat toy for my parents’ pond and the local lakes or Gulf of Mexico fun days, these are going to be perfect for us!
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