Latest news with #EthCC
CNBC
20 hours ago
- Business
- CNBC
Ethereum is powering Wall Street's future. The crypto scene at Cannes shows how far it's come
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. 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." 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. 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 stablecoin market share. "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. "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. The Senate's recent passage of the GENIUS Act, along with Circle's IPO, gave the industry a regulatory tailwind and helped reinforce Ethereum's role as the infrastructure layer for tokenized finance. 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. 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.
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Filecoin Gains as Much as 9% Amid Wider Crypto Market Rally
Filecoin (FIL) surged as much as 9% in the last 24 hours, climbing from $2.24 to $2.44 with exceptional volume support at the $2.30 level, according to CoinDesk Research's technical analysis model. The model showed that FIL has established strong support at $2.40 despite wider market uncertainty. Filecoin is holding an informal networking evening on July 3 in Cannes, aligned with EthCC. The rally in Filecoin came as the wider crypto market also rose, with the broader market gauge, the Coindesk 20, recently up 3.9%. In recent trading, FIL was 6.4% higher over 24 hours, trading around $2.395. Technical Analysis: FIL traded within an $0.19 range (8.5%) between the low of $2.24 and high of $2.44 during the last 24 hours Most significant price movement occurred during the 16:00 hour on July 2, with a 5.2% surge on high volume (11 million units), establishing strong support at $2.30. After reaching $2.44 at 07:00 on July 3, FIL entered consolidation with increased selling pressure forming resistance around $2.42. During the 60-minute period from July 3 11:50 to 12:49, FIL showed high volatility with an uptrend to $2.42 at 12:30, followed by a sharp 4.5% correction to $2.37. Notable volume spike (739,000 units) at 12:30-12:31 triggered the reversal, with support established at $2.38. Decreasing volume in final minutes suggests consolidation after the volatile hour.
Crypto Insight
4 days ago
- Business
- Crypto Insight
TradFi could move onchain due to ‘horrible banking experiences'
Crypto has a chance to court traditional finance players, who are already looking at non-traditional financial technology after being let down by banks, says Aave Labs founder Stani Kulechov. 'Thanks to horrible banking experiences, we've seen a lot of finance coming into fintech, and fintech applications [have been] able to capture a lot of market share,' Kulechov said onstage at EthCC 2025. He added that Aave Labs, which develops the decentralized lending and liquidity platform Aave Protocol, and other decentralized finance projects have been 'working on how to actually get all this utility into more decentralized mediums.' 'Over 60% of the population has some sort of a digital wallet. It's not onchain, but they have some sort of a digital means of interacting with certain transactions,' Kulechov said. 'A lot of the adoption has happened in digital finance at the moment, and the continuation is how to bring this mass onchain.' Tokenized real-world assets can pull in TradFi Kulechov said that the tokenization of real-world assets is a 'multi-trillion-dollar opportunity' for the crypto sector to engage with traditional finance. 'There's real estate, there's government bonds, there's equities, corporate bonds, and there's a bunch of other categories of assets out there that could be more efficiently handled on a transparent ledger and a more programmable environment,' he added. Kulechov said that if the crypto sector is 'able to get all this legacy stuff onchain,' it could create a more efficient environment for the assets and could 'build beyond' and create assets that 'could exist that [don't] exist because of these inefficiencies.' 'DeFi is the only technology that actually can do that in a borderless way,' he added. DeFi needs to be '10 times better' for mass adoption Kulechov, however, acknowledged that decentralized finance 'is not really known publicly' and many protocols, including Aave, are 'not even close' to having the same number of users as some fintech apps. He said DeFi needs to present 'a clear value proposition' and needs to solve 'real problems and have good solutions' to have a chance at mass adoption, adding: 'If we want to compete with traditional finance, if we want to change the world, we want to do things 10 times better.' 'Your product needs to be 10 times better,' he said. 'When we bring the traditional assets, the traditional value chain, we have to offer something that is much better. There needs to be a better value proposition: Simplicity and accessibility,' he added. TradFi has started to use blockchain Some financial tech companies have started to use blockchain technology, including BlackRock, which launched an Ethereum-based tokenized money market fund in March 2024 that has grown to over $2.8 billion in total value. The company also filed in April to create a share class based on a digital ledger for its Treasury Trust fund, which will use blockchain to record share ownership. Asset manager Libre Capital said in April that it would tokenize $500 million in Telegram debt, which is available to accredited investors and usable as collateral for onchain borrowing. Source:
Business Insider
6 days ago
- Business
- Business Insider
Aleo to Host and Join Key Privacy & Stablecoin Events at ETHCC Cannes
Aleo, the Layer-1 blockchain focused on privacy and compliance, has confirmed details of the events it will be participating in at ETHCC in Cannes. During the course of the four-day conference in the South of France, delegates will be able to meet the Aleo team and learn more about its ZK-based tech stack through a series of events. Set to run from June 30 to July 4, the largest Ethereum developer event will feature a packed schedule of conferences, networking, and learning opportunities. Aleo will be involved with three key events at ETHCC: Stablecoin House, The OPSEC Salon, and Pragma Cannes. Dubbed the unofficial command center for stablecoin builders, Stablecoin House is poised to live up to its name. For three days, stablecoin-focused developers and operators will assemble in a seaside villa that will serve as an open coworking space and builder house. In addition to having a presence at Stablecoin House for the duration of ETHCC, Aleo will participate in The OPSEC Salon on July 3. Dedicated to exploring privacy and security across web3 layers, the one-day event in the heart of Cannes brings together protocol leaders, privacy experts, and security professionals, including members of Aleo and Creed. In addition to giving attendees a 360° view of operational security, the event will follow suit for the Cannes skyline, concluding with happy hour on the rooftop bar. Provable CEO Howard Wu said: 'EthCC has always been a hugely important event for us, since it unites so many of the industry's brightest minds, from developers working on the coalface to investors writing checks in the board room. We're happy to be back at EthCC in a hands-on capacity this year to talk privacy, security standards, and to catch up with as many fellow builders as possible.' On July 3, Aleo will also participate in ETHCC side event Pragma Cannes. The intimate one-day conference unites founders and builders to discuss the future of web3 and reflect on the past. Highlights include a keynote from Howard Wu. In 'The Privacy Spectrum: From Shadows to Standards,' the Provable CEO will explore how developers can create private applications on Aleo. Afterwards, Pragma concludes with a fireside chat with Vitalik Buterin. Set against the stunning backdrop of the French Riviera, ETHCC will attract developers, investors, and thought leaders working on the frontlines of web3 innovation. Aleo will be present throughout Europe's largest Ethereum-focused event to share insights, connect with developers, and explore opportunities to collaborate on ZK-powered privacy solutions. Aleo is a Layer-1 blockchain focused on private and compliant payments backed by leading VCs including a16z Crypto, Haun Ventures, SoftBank Vision Fund, and Samsung Next. Aleo launched day 1 with Coinbase and recently announced a partnership with Google Cloud to explore confidential and compliant web3 payment solutions. As the industry continues to push toward more secure and privacy-first solutions, Aleo remains committed to making web3 privacy a native, accessible feature for mainstream adoption. For more information about Aleo and to stay updated on its latest developments, visit
