Cannes – Wall Street’s new plumbing is being built Ethereum And this week the architect descended to the same French Riviera Villa and red carpet venue, which will host the Cannes Film Festival in May.
The Ethereum Community Conference (ETHCC) transformed the beachside town into a hub of crypto founders, developers and facility giants that now build on top of infrastructure. Crypto Elite has climbed the iconic step of the Palais Des Festivals, a film landmark that is usually reserved for movie stars.
“The atmosphere this year has been palpable in Cannes,” said Bettina Boon Falleur, the great power behind ETHCC for the past seven years. “The fame of this place, combined with the quality of its lecture, strengthened Ethereum’s height and purpose in the broader ecosystem.”
Private parties spread across Cliffside Estates and exclusive resorts, but the conversation wasn’t about price action, it was a conversation about the evolving role of blockchain as a backend for global finance.
Ethcc is now in its eighth year and tracks the trajectory of Ethereum, from Scrappy Experiment to its institutional backbone.
“The impact this year has been unmistakable,” Farour said. “From Robinhood to adopting decentralized financial infrastructure through arbitrum to local governments like Cannes, we are exploring deeper integration with the crypto economy.”
Certainly, one of the boldest moves came this week Robin HoodIt became the first publicly released US company to release tokenized stocks in chains.
At a product showcase held inside the Belle Epoque Mansion overlooking the ocean, Robinhood unveiled a drastic new crypto strategy, including the ability for European users to trade tokenized US stocks and ETFs through Arbitrum, a layer-2 network built on Ethereum.
The announcement helped push Robinhood stocks beyond $100 for the first time, closing out a fresh, top-high of the week and a 30% or more rally. S&P 500 Recent rebalancing.
Within the Palais des Festivals, Ethcc brings founders, developers and institutions into the same hall that hosts the world’s largest film premiere. This time, it’s for the future of finance.
Mackenzie Cigarros
Ether, the native token of the Ethereum blockchain, rose nearly 6% a week, with several public stocks associated with the blockchain recovering in addition to that.
Bitmine Immersion Technologiesthe Bitcoin mining company has earned more than 1,200% since it announced that ether would become a major Treasury asset. Bit Digitalrecently ended Bitcoin mining and “become pure play” Ethereum Staking and Treasury Company, which won over 34% this week. and Sharplink Gamesadded more than $20 million in ether to its balance sheet this week, jumping over 28% on Thursday.
The influx of ether ETFs is also rising again. This is a sign that institutional investors are getting warmer.
Ether has also dropped by more than 20% this year, falling behind Bitcoin in terms of market capitalization and recruitment. However, Coinglass data shows that fund tracking ETH has been net inflows for almost two months in a row. Still, the Ether ETF totals $11 billion, compared to the $138 billion Bitcoin ETF.
The agency has not bets on Ethereum for hype. They bet on infrastructure.
Momentum is shifting towards utility, despite prices stalling and networks facing slower base tier revenues and faster rivals like Solana.
“Ethereum is connected to these core transaction systems,” Paul Brody, EY’s global blockchain leader, told CNBC about ETHCC’s bystanders. “Investors, savers, people who drive money — they’re starting to shift from some of the old mechanisms of doing this to the Ethereum ecosystem, where these transactions can be attached faster, cheaper and, very importantly, important new features.”
Crypto’s founders and developers will climb the iconic Red Carpet stairs at Palais des Festivals. This is the familiar backdrop of the Cannes Film Festival, which is currently being reused for Ethereum’s flagship European event.
Mackenzie Cigarros
German Bank Recently, we announced that ZKSYNC will be building a tokenization platform (a fast and cost-effective blockchain built on Ethereum) while meeting regulatory and data protection requirements while issuing and managing tokenized funds, stubcoins and other real-world assets.
Coinbase Kraken also races to own a crossover between traditional stocks and crypto.
Coinbase filed with the SEC to provide transactions with tokenized public equity. Etro.
Kraken has announced plans to offer 24/7 trading of US stock tokens in select international markets.
Black RockBuidl’s tokenized money market fund launched last year at Ethereum will provide USDC with eligible investors to navigate eligible investors with real-time settled redemption yields.
Meanwhile, Stablecoins continue to function as the backbone of the financial layer of Ethereum.
circle The second largest Stablecoin, USDC, still settles around 65% of the volume on Ethereum’s rails. According to Coingecko’s latest “State of Stablecoins” report, Ethereum accounts for almost 50% of the Stablecoin market share.
“ETHCC builders and contributors aren’t following the next bull run,” Falleur said.
Even as new blockchains advertise faster speeds and lower rates, Ethereum is proving its lasting potential as a trustworthy network.
Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, told CNBC in Cannes that there is an assumption that institutions care only about scale and speed, but in reality it is the opposite.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin will give a keynote speech at ETHCC, laying out the network’s next steps and its value tests as institutional adoption accelerates.
ETHCC
“Many agencies will tell our faces that they value Ethereum, essentially because it’s stable and reliable, so it doesn’t go down,” he said.
Buterin added that companies often ask about privacy and other long-term features, the kind of concerns the institutions say “really valuable.”
Tomasz Stańczak, the new co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, said the agency is choosing Ethereum for the same core reasons.
“A decade that won’t stop for a while. A decade upgrade with great dedication to security and censorship resistance,” he said.
He added that when institutions send orders to the market, they “want to be absolutely certain that their orders will be treated fairly and that no one likes them, and that the transaction will be carried out when it is actually delivered.”
These guarantees become increasingly valuable as stubcoins and tokenized assets move into the mainstream.
The Senate’s recent passing of the Genius Act, along with the circle’s IPO, has given the industry a regulatory tailwind and strengthened Ethereum’s role as the infrastructure layer of tokenized finance.
Ethereum’s core values - neutrality, security and censorship resistance emerge as competitive advantages. The current actual test is whether Ethereum can expand those ideals without compromising.
“We don’t just want to succeed,” Butarin said from the main stage of the Palais this week. “We want to be something worthy of success.”
His hope, he added, is that future generations look back and see a network that truly provides openness, freedom and unauthorized access to the masses.
White Clad guests dance by the pool at a rave party in Cannes.
Mackenzie Cigarros
However, the week was closed in the conference hall, not in tradition. The Rave Party was lit up on the balcony of Villa Montana overlooking the Bay of Cannes.
Whiteclad guests sipped cocktails as DJs spin in the pool and curled from the smoke machine.
This year, Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov and Defi icon Aave founder Stani Kulechov stood on a balcony overlooking the crowds and the light skyline of Cannes.
This was a fitting snapshot of the momentum behind the institutional rise of Ethereum and its shift from niche experiments to financial mainstreams.
Watch: Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev explains the “duplex purpose” behind the trading platform’s new Crypto product
