EthCC Cannes Quick Report: When bankers take a seat in the developers' conference

Original author: Zhang Ling’e, Deep Tide TechFlow

From March 30 to April 2, Europe’s largest annual Ethereum conference, EthCC, is being held at the Palais des Festivals during the Cannes Film Festival.

More than 400 speakers, a four-day program, and 15 tracks. But this year, the most worth-watching thing isn’t the content of any particular talk—it’s that the composition of the audience has changed.

It’s not surprising to see the SG-Forge CEO Jean-Marc Stenger of Société Générale, Aave founder Stani Kulechov, and Vitalik Buterin appearing on the same stage. What’s new is that names from traditional finance—Bloomberg, S&P Global, BNP Paribas, Euroclear, Amundi, and Tradeweb—are appearing on the agenda of an Ethereum community conference as formal participants for the first time.

Jérôme de Tychey, founder of Ethereum France, is very direct in his assessment: “2026 is the year when Ethereum and the entire crypto ecosystem become specialized as an industry.”

Aave V4: The “institutionalization” upgrade of DeFi lending

The most heavyweight product launch during the conference was the rollout of Aave V4 on the Ethereum mainnet. As the largest lending protocol in the DeFi space (TVL over $24 billion), this upgrade isn’t patchwork—it’s an architectural rebuild.

V4 introduces a “Hub-and-Spoke” model: liquidity is concentrated in a shared Hub, and each independent lending market (Spoke) can have its own collateral rules, risk parameters, and repayment logic, while also getting access to shared liquidity pools through credit limits controlled by governance.

The core contradiction this design resolves is: in the past, DeFi lending either stuffed assets with different risk tiers into the same pool (risk contagion), or split them into independently deployed systems (liquidity fragmentation). V4 lets both coexist.

More importantly, V4’s intent is institutionalization. The new architecture supports institution-specific lending environments, structured credit products, RWA (real-world asset) collateralized borrowing, and fixed-rate products. Kulechov puts it plainly: “DeFi has already built deep liquidity. V4’s job is to put this liquidity into real credit markets.”

The initial Spoke partners to go live include Lido, EtherFi, Kelp, Ethena, and Lombard. Supported assets cover USDT, USDC, EURC (Circle’s euro stablecoin), XAUt (Tether’s gold token), cbBTC (Coinbase-wrapped Bitcoin), and more. Chainlink serves as the exclusive oracle provider.

Worth noting: the rollout process for V4 hasn’t been smooth. In February, Aave’s main engineering team, BGD Labs, announced it was splitting with the DAO, citing disagreements over the protocol’s direction. A few weeks later, one of the largest delegated service providers in Aave governance, Aave Chan Initiative, also announced its exit. Against the backdrop of key contributors stepping away one after another, V4 still passed governance votes and completed deployment. The AAVE token is currently trading at roughly $98. Over the past 12 months, it has fallen by about 40%.

The Agora: An institution-exclusive forum makes its first appearance

The biggest structural change at this year’s EthCC is the establishment of an institution-exclusive forum, “The Agora,” co-planned by crypto market data company Kaiko, held on March 31 at the Palais des Festivals in Cannes.

This is EthCC’s first-ever official satellite event. Its positioning is very clear: “A meeting where digital finance encounters an institution-led culture of open thinking.” Discussion topics cover tokenization of financial instruments, the evolution of crypto market structure, institutional trading infrastructure, and capital efficiency in digital asset markets. About 60 expert speakers presented to roughly 600 participants from traditional finance and Web3.

The lineup of participating institutions highlights the essence of the matter: Bloomberg, S&P Global, BNP Paribas, Euroclear, Amundi, Société Générale-Forge, Tradeweb, Google, and a batch of leading blockchain projects. This isn’t a scenario of “bankers visiting the crypto world”—it’s “bankers coming to discuss how to move their own business onto the chain.”

Regulatory puzzle pieces come together: MiCA + CLARITY

One of the main themes of the conference was the arrival of regulatory clarity.

In Europe, MiCA (the Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation) is expected to be fully implemented by mid-2026, covering trading platforms, stablecoins, and institutional participants. Along with new crypto tax reporting rules that provide compliance pathways for taxes in individual European countries, the EU is building a systematic regulatory framework for digital assets.

In the United States, the CLARITY bill (Comprehensive Legality and Regulatory Integrity for Technology) is being advanced continuously, providing legal clarity to the intersection between blockchain and traditional finance.

Multiple institutional panel discussions conveyed the same message: regulatory uncertainty used to be the biggest obstacle for institutions to enter, and that obstacle is now being dismantled systematically. What remains isn’t the question of “whether to enter,” but the execution question of “which chain to choose, which products to use, and at what speed.”

Otto Jacobsson, CEO of YAP Global, best summarized the conference atmosphere: “Developers, founders, and institutions are now sitting in the same room to discuss DeFi, stablecoins, and on-chain finance. These conversations are happening within the framework of MiCA and Europe’s new regulations.”

Around EthCC: a stablecoin summit and a hackathon

EthCC’s week isn’t limited to the main venue. Alongside the main conference, Cannes also hosted a series of satellite events in parallel.

Stable Summit focused on the stablecoin ecosystem, discussing how stablecoins and tokenized deposits change cross-border payments, settlement systems, and capital markets. Hack Seasons Conference Cannes brought together blockchain founders and institutional investors. On March 30, Aave hosted a dedicated “DeFi Day Cannes” session. After EthCC ended, ETHGlobal’s hackathon immediately took over, continuing last year’s tradition in Cannes of attracting 1,000 top developers.

The real significance of EthCC isn’t any single release or talk. It marks a turning point: the main narrative of the Ethereum ecosystem has shifted from “what we are building” to “who is using it, how they are using it, and under which compliance framework.”

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