In-depth analysis of the top ten ETHGlobal Cannes: From EIP-7702 to privacy pools, how technology solves real pain points

As the forefront of innovation in the Ethereum ecosystem, the ETHGlobal hackathon series' winning projects often indicate the future technological focus and application directions of the industry. The 10 finalist projects from the 2025 Cannes station covered key areas from underlying protocol optimization, decentralized finance (DeFi), AI integration to user privacy protection. This report aims to provide an in-depth technical and market potential analysis of these ten projects for industry observers, researchers, and investors.

1. BeamPay: A Pragmatic Pioneer of Account Abstraction

• Core Function: By implementing the EIP-7702 protocol, it allows users to complete ERC20 token payments with metadata in a single transaction, simplifying user operation processes.
• Pain Point Solved: Every Web3 user may have experienced this complexity: when using tokens for payment or interaction, they often need to complete "Approve" and "Transfer" steps. This process is not only unfriendly to newcomers, increasing on-chain operation costs and time, but also hides security risks from unlimited authorization.
• Technical Implementation and Innovation: BeamPay's core innovation lies in its pioneering application of EIP-7702. EIP-7702 is a key proposal in the Ethereum Account Abstraction roadmap, allowing external accounts (EOA) to temporarily "delegate" their control to a piece of code (similar to a mini smart contract) at the transaction level. By this method, BeamPay can package approve and transferFrom operations in one atomic transaction, completed with a single user signature. Unlike EIP-4337, which relies on relayers and complex infrastructure, EIP-7702 provides a more lightweight Account Abstraction implementation path with less invasiveness to the existing wallet ecosystem.
• Market Potential and Significance: BeamPay's significance is not in creating a new application scenario, but in positively addressing one of the core obstacles to Web3 mass adoption - user experience. By significantly simplifying the most common payment process, it can greatly lower the dApp usage threshold and improve user retention. As an early practical example of EIP-7702, BeamPay demonstrates the huge potential of this proposal to the entire developer community, promising to accelerate Web3 payment experience towards a seamless Web2-like approach.

• Core Function: Create parallel betting pools for hackathons, allowing participants and fans to bet on winners across multiple tracks.
• Pain Point Solved: Hackathons are innovation forges, but also high-risk gambles. Participants invest tremendous effort, with only a few winning rewards; while community fans, beyond "powering with love", lack a channel to convert their insights and support into actual returns.
• Technical Implementation and Innovation: The livestakes model is a sophisticated "metagame". It transforms the hackathon event itself into an economic system that can be gambled on. Its innovations include: 1) Risk Hedging: Participating teams can bet on themselves or others, thereby hedging their risk of not winning awards. 2) Community Participation: Fans and investors can express support for projects they believe in through betting, and monetize their judgment. 3) Incentive Alignment: Through carefully designed prize pool allocation mechanisms, it more closely binds the interests of participants, judges, and the community, forming a micro-economy centered around innovation incubation.
• Market Potential and Significance: Although livestakes has a niche scenario, its model is highly replicable. It can be extended to any form of competition, selection, or creative activity, such as startup contests or film festival award predictions. Essentially, it uses token economics to create an intrinsic financial layer with incentive compatibility for specific communities, representing an imaginative Web3 exploration in community economics.

5. Pace Club: A Vertical Social Application Empowered by Web3

• Core Function: A running social application focused on female communities, prioritizing privacy with reward mechanisms and a trust system.
• Pain Point Solved: In mainstream sports apps, running or sharing routes can potentially expose privacy risks or even personal safety threats for many female users. Meanwhile, their valuable exercise data is used commercially by platforms without compensation.
• Technical Implementation and Innovation: Pace Club's innovation lies in applying Web3 technology to solve real-world social pain points. 1) Privacy Protection: Possibly utilizing stealth addresses or zero-knowledge proof-based location verification technologies, allowing users to verify participation in running activities without exposing precise home addresses or daily routes. 2) Trust System: Establishing a member trust scoring system through an on-chain reputation system (potentially associated with Soulbound Tokens). 3) Reward Mechanism: "Tokenizing" running mileage or activity participation, forming a "Run-to-Earn" incentive loop that rewards active participation.
• Market Potential and Significance: Pace Club is an excellent example of Web3 applications transitioning from financial tools to lifestyle tools. It proves that crypto technology can protect not just assets, but also personal safety and individual data. By entering a specific vertical domain, it demonstrates Web3's enormous potential in building new communities with stronger trust and better incentive mechanisms.

• Core Function: Guide users into a focused or meditative state through personalized audio-visual experiences, and mint each unique healing journey as a Non-Fungible Token.
• Pain Point Addressed: The Non-Fungible Token market is flooded with static images (PFP), whose value heavily depends on community consensus and hype, lacking intrinsic, personalized experience value. How can Non-Fungible Tokens transcend the "small picture" category and become a truly unique, perceptible digital artwork?
• Technical Implementation and Innovation: ChromaMind's innovation lies in binding subjective personal experiences with objective on-chain assets. 1) Dynamic Generation: Audio-visual experiences may be generated in real-time based on certain input parameters (such as user-selected emotions, time, etc.), ensuring the uniqueness of each experience. 2) Experience Digitization: Hash the key parameters generating the experience and user interaction data as part of the Non-Fungible Token metadata, making it a "digital fingerprint" of that sensory journey. 3) Programmable Art: This Non-Fungible Token is "alive", with its visual presentation or sound effects potentially changing based on external conditions (such as time, weather) or the holder's on-chain behavior.
• Market Potential and Significance: ChromaMind expands the boundaries of Non-Fungible Tokens, moving from "proof of ownership" to "proof of experience". It opens up new possibilities for digital art and collectibles, where Non-Fungible Tokens can become containers for personal memories and unique experiences. This has broad application prospects in digital healing, personalized art, and immersive entertainment.

9. PrivacyLinks: An Integrated Web3 Privacy Browsing Solution

• Core Function: A browser wallet integrating multiple privacy technologies, aimed at providing a comprehensive private Web3 browsing experience.
• Pain Point Addressed: In the Web3 world, your wallet address is like a transparent glass box. Your assets, transaction history, and even activities across different chains can be easily tracked and linked.
• Technical Implementation and Innovation: PrivacyLinks is a "comprehensive integrator" of privacy technologies. It integrates three key technologies in one wallet: 1) Privacy Pools: For asset privacy protection, cutting the direct connection between fund sources and destinations. 2) Stealth Addresses: For privacy protection when receiving assets, preventing the recipient's address from being publicly exposed. 3) Cross-Chain Session Isolation: An important innovation aimed at preventing analysis tools from associating a user's activities on different blockchains to the same identity through heuristic methods such as time and amount.
• Market Potential and Significance: PrivacyLinks aims to become the "Brave" or "Tor Browser" of the Web3 era, providing users with a one-stop, default privacy protection. By packaging complex underlying technologies into an easy-to-use product, it greatly lowers the threshold for users to enjoy privacy, and is an important force in pushing on-chain privacy protection from an "optional feature" to a "basic human right".

10. Hashlocked: Exploring a New Path of Bitcoin-EVM Interoperability

• Core Function: Achieve trustless two-way atomic swaps between EVM and BTC through 1INCH contract.
• Pain Point Addressed: BTC is the anchor of value in the crypto world, but it's like an isolated island, with its massive liquidity difficult to safely and smoothly enter the prosperous EVM ecosystem to participate in DeFi.
• Technical Implementation and Innovation: The classic implementation of atomic swaps is Hashed Timelock Contracts (HTLC). Hashlocked's innovation may lie in its creative use of the 1INCH contract. One possible speculation is that it uses 1INCH's Limit Order Protocol to create a decentralized cross-chain order book. Users can create an "intent" on the EVM chain, indicating willingness to exchange X amount of ETH/USDC for Y amount of BTC, locking their EVM assets with a hash lock. BTC holders can then create a corresponding HTLC transaction on the Bitcoin chain.
• Market Potential and Significance: Against the backdrop of Bitcoin spot ETF opening trillion-level fund entry, any technology that can safely connect BTC liquidity with EVM ecosystem DeFi applications has enormous strategic value. Hashlocked's exploration represents the industry's unremitting efforts to solve this "holy grail" problem.