And that's a wrap for @EthCC 🇫🇷! Some critical takeaways: 1. The debate over what is defi vs. cefi is heating up. With institutions onboarding, a year long injunction over enforcement from regulators, and all-but "defi" left as a budding crypto use-case the goal posts have been moved creating more systemic risk, aka Drift. 2. Access-control and permission management instead of DAOs. A lack of decentralisation = an increase in counter-party risk. For institutions and defi, counter-party risk is a critical concern. 3. Institutions are coming but not to bring us liquidity and users. They are here to use the existing rails and buy or build internal systems to migrate their users without losing them. If this succeeds only a few crypto native projects will benefit. Not all boats will rise with the tides. 4. Privacy was and still is an unfulfilled requirement in crypto yet everyone has claims to offer it. The delineation between confidentiality and privacy is critical. Institutions are focused on confidentiality and will accept this as sufficient, hence the goal posts have been moved and we have to ensure the definitions don't. 5. There is an existential problem with the value of native tokens due to misaligned incentives, poor token designs, and lack of investor relations. @MikeIppolito_ and I discuss this over dinner and both of our teams are working together to improve this to make tokens an investible asset class. 6. The old guard is out the new guard is in. There was a transformative shift in attendees in Cannes this year. I met lots of new market entrants from fintech and tradfi. Some were working for tier 1 projects and didn't know about infra such as SAFE or Aragon. I guess that's normal in the real world? Most people don't know Ericsson, AWS, SIX, SEPA, etc. 7. Lots of projects are going out of business and lots of great people caught in the fire looking for their next job. There are no free meals anymore. Similarly professionality has increased with more focus, less parties, yet a calmer atmosphere. It's a long game now.

Strong summary. The risk is not only cefi gaining ground, but crypto slowly losing confidence in its own differentiators. Institutions can help validate a market, but they should not be the reason privacy gets diluted, tokens lose purpose, or coordination collapses back into trust heavy structures. If anything, this is where zk should be doing its best work: reducing trust assumptions while still making room for confidentiality, compliance, and usable applications. The winners may be the teams that can bridge real world requirements and crypto native advantages without forcing a false tradeoff between them.