ETHCC Takeway: Ethereum is Back
Olivia Capozzalo & Camila Russo
July 07, 2025
Happy Monday, Defiers!
Today’s big story:
- ETHCC showed the Ethereum community has regained its confidence
Plus:
- The UAE says crypto investors will not have a simplified path to long-term residency, in response to the TON Foundation’s new program
- Vitalik and an EF researcher proposed EIP-7983 to set a per transaction gas limit
- Arkham says 2011 whale that just moved 80,000 BTC is not looking to sell
- Elon Musk’s newly formed political party will embrace Bitcoin
- SSV 2.0 and based appplications: Decentralized infrastructure for secure, scalable Ethereum staking [SPONSORED]
- The Stellar development roadmap paves way for expansion and network scalability [SPONSORED]
Read more below! But first, please give our sponsors some love; they make this newsletter possible.
DIA launches $DIA Staking and Oracle Grants with 20 chains, including Arbitrum, BNB Chain, and Avalanche. Power your dApp with trustless oracles, cost-free.
DeFi is evolving rapidly and maturing, entering a new phase of adoption and growth. With both established protocols like Aave and new entrants driving innovation in capital efficiency and market design. However, liquidity fragmentation across chains and protocols remains a core limitation, particularly in the lending sector. Soul’s new DeFi primitive addresses this by enabling cross-chain lending coordination, using LayerZero’s messaging infrastructure to allow users to borrow across chains and protocols while keeping collateral in one place. Built by the team behind Hatom, a 2 years old secure and mature lending protocol, Soul aims to become a foundational layer in a new phase of interoperable and composable DeFi.
READ MORE: Solving major DeFi problems: Soul new primitive to finally solve liquidity fragmentation
We’re back! Here’s what you need to know in web3 today
“Worthy of Succeeding”: Ethereum’s Triumphant Return at ETHCC8
“Good luck getting in,” a conference goer told me as I pushed open the door to the main hall. Thousands filled the room, taking up every seat and standing in the halls, holding on to every word Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin was saying. Near the end of the talk, I came across my favorite quote from the entire conference.
“We don’t want just to succeed. We want to be worthy of succeeding,” he said.
That was one of the final keynotes of the week. Vitalik was once again inspiring builders and investors of his network with his signature leadership style, a blend of self-criticism, idealism, and ambition. It was yet another proof point of what I had been seeing all week at ETHCC8. The sentiment shift that had been building for weeks was impossible to ignore but the conference in Cannes put it in undeniable display: Ethereum leadership has succeeded in turning around a boat that was drifting, flailing at times.
The Ethereum ship has now raised its sails, caught favorable winds, and is cruising at full speed with the entire community on board, much like the yachts conference goers saw from pastel villas perched on green hills rolling into the blue Mediterranean. Conference attendees roamed sidewalk cafés where Aperol spritzes flowed, clad in linen shirts and sunglasses. They bumped into old friends and made new ones, every rooftop and beachside event pulsing with possibility. Ethereans were happy and relaxed in the belief that victory is inevitable.
What Three Months Can Do
At the last major Ethereum event, ETHDenver, the vibe was much more muted. The venue felt half-empty, panels were dotted with competing Layer 1s, and talks of ETH underperformance prevailed.
That was just three months ago, but so much has happened in that short period. A full leadership change of the Ethereum Foundation, the launch of Etherealize as a marketing arm, and a tsunami of Ethereum-linked stablecoin and real-world asset news. All of which injected the community with renewed confidence. Complacency is out; war mode is in.
Hype Cycle Vibes
There was a bit of the vibes you get from over-the-top hype cycles, which were intensified by the location. Helicopter rides (Consensus), beach-side dinners (Zerion, Boundless, LayerZero, and KryptoPlanet), chateau-side dinners (Robinhood), raves by the pool of a mansion with attendees wearing all white (Aave).
If in hindsight we’re at the frothy part of another crypto bull run, it’s unlike any before (I know, famous last words). Previous highs were fueled by NFTs, ICOs and yield farms. Fads that often proved unsustainable (even as the underlying ideas were valuable). This time around though, optimism is driven by what feels a lot more… real. The name of the trend has it in the name itself: Real world assets. Financial assets are coming onchain, and that includes the U.S. dollar and its tokenized version, stablecoins, to Treasuries and private credit.
Also, this time it’s not just VC-backed startups and cypherpunks driving projects, but the world’s biggest fintechs, asset managers and banks are rolling out meaningful onchain products. Even presidents and the U.S. Congress are backing the industry this time around.
Meanwhile, in off-conference land, Tom Lee of Fundstrat further fueled Ethereans’ optimism by laying out his case on why stablecoins and RWAs will push ETH to $10,000.
Robinhood Announcement
What drove it home was Robinhood kicking off the week with its splashy announcement. The retail trading giant will offer tokenized stocks for its European clients, using Arbitrum first, and then spinning up its own Ethereum Layer 2 powered by Arbitrum tech. Conversations all week circled back to that announcement.
The agenda remained hyper-focused on Ethereum with hardly any mention of other Layer 1s except if it was to talk about how they can connect back to Ethereum. There was also very little complaining about ETH underperformance. Outside of stablecoins and RWAs, other big themes throughout the talks were how ZK tech is now production-ready, the growing consensus that we’ll see a future of many app-specific chains, how Layer 2s bring value to Ethereum, and the DeFi mullet as a way to bring in new users onchain.
Values-led Ambition
The Ethereum Foundation’s Tomasz Stanczak painted a strategic two-step vision: widen adoption so users directly benefit from Ethereum’s values, and harden both the technical and social fabrics of the network. It tied nicely with Vitalik’s talk, a critique of “technological optimism” without deliberate design, stressing that decentralization must survive the “walkaway test” and the “insider-attack test” to truly empower users.
But the biggest takeaway for me is that it’s clear that Ethereum leadership listened to the community and made the changes needed to get everyone back on the boat. As they sailed into the sunset at the end of the week in Cannes, it remains to be seen whether that will translate into products that both improve people’s lives and retain the cypherpunk values Vitalik says would make the network worthy of its success.
With love,
Cami, founder of The Defiant
📈 Markets in the last 24 hrs:
| TICKER | VALUE | 24H | |
|---|---|---|---|
 | Bitcoin | $108,505 | -0.24 % |
 | Ethereum | $2,537.07 | -0.63 % |
 | XRP | $2.34 | 3.02 % |
 | BNB | $659.76 | -0.44 % |
 | Solana | $151.79 | 0.45 % |
 MessariPortals | MINDSHARE Rank | MINDSHARE % Change (7d) |
|---|---|---|
 | MINDSHARE Rank | MINDSHARE % Change (7d) |
 |  | -5.24% |
 |  | 35.64% |
 | | 343.66% |
| Powered by Messari Portals | ||
This is the news that mattered in the past 24 hrs
- The TON Foundation announced over the weekend that TON holders staking at least $100,000 in TON could pay a $35,000 fee to receive a 10-year UAE Golden Visa, bypassing the usual application requirements. On Sunday, the UAE government said that crypto investment does not qualify as a basis for the long-term residency visa.
- Vitalik Buterin and Ethereum Foundation researcher Toni Wahrstätter have filed EIP-7983, calling for a protocol-level cap of 16.77 million gas on every transaction to mitigate the risk of denial of service attacks, among other reasons.
- Blockchain analytics firm Arkham said that the 2011 BTC whale that moved a total of 80,000 BTC (currently worth over $8.5 billion) does not appear to be preparing to sell the Bitcoin; instead, the transfers may be related to address upgrades.
- When asked by an X user if Elon Musk’s new political party, the official formation of which he announced on Saturday, will embrace Bitcoin, Musk said “Fiat is hopeless, so yes”.
🎬WATCH
On the latest episode of The Defiant Podcast, Vinny spoke with Vikram Arun, CEO of Superform, about the evolution of stablecoins as a financial tool, why automation is critical for DeFi growth, and whether 20% on-chain yields are truly sustainable in today’s crypto economy.
That’s it for today — if you enjoyed this newsletter, tell your friends! https://thedefiant.io/subscribe
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