"ETHCC is not a narrative conference" The recently concluded ETHCC 2025 in Cannes was completely different from last year's event in Brussels. This year, it is no longer a place for telling new stories; instead, it feels more like a reckoning of the flaws in old narratives. @VitalikButerin's set of "three questions of decentralization"—the exit test, the insider test, and the trustworthy code—may seem philosophical, but they serve as a satirical alarm for the current state of Layer 2: With one-click upgrades for L2, managed front ends, and centralized dependencies on ZK, the technology is exquisite, but if the founder runs away or the RPC goes haywire, are you still free? This is not a hypothesis; it is reality. @StaniKulechov puts it more directly: For DeFi to win, it shouldn't rely on "higher yields" but rather on trustworthy and programmable yields. The next wave of users isn't coming to take a class; they want a wallet that can run with just a click + a clear yield model. RWAs are the bridge. @BlackRock's $2.8 billion fund and @LibreCapital's $500 million debt are not here to speculate on coins; they are building a more transparent and flexible financial foundation. At the infrastructure layer, Rollup + AI is the new combination: ZK brings privacy and throughput, while AI is applied in contract auditing, DAO governance, and security tools—not just to ride the trend, but to genuinely enhance the execution power of decentralization. Stablecoins are also evolving: GHO, crvUSD, and USDe each play with mechanisms, turning "arbitrage currencies" into protocol money at the asset layer. @AleoHQ transforms privacy into a moat friendly to institutions, attempting to balance the contradiction between on-chain identity compliance and transparency. Narrative farming is a thing of the past; true builders are doing subtraction: Eliminating centralized dependencies, complex interactions, and fooling incentives, leaving only a system structure that is resilient to risks and censorship.