Addressable at EthCC Cannes. Infrastructure Is Ready. But Is the Industry?
Cannes is famous for film festivals and the ultra-wealthy. Starting this week, it is also home to Europe's largest Ethereum gathering, and a question the entire Web3 industry has been quietly avoiding.
EthCC | March 30 to April 2, 2026 | marks a genuine inflection point. Not because the technology has suddenly leapt forward, but because the conversation has. This is the edition where builders and bankers share a stage, where Vitalik Buterin and Jean-Marc Stenger of Societe Generale-Forge are both keynoting, and where the institutional track is not a fringe addition but a centerpiece. After years of "institutions are coming," they have arrived. And now the harder question begins: why are there still so few everyday users?
Addressable will be there for both EthCC and the Hack Seasons Conference. And at HackSeasons on April 1, our Co-Founder Asaf Nadler will be moderating the panel that puts that question directly on the table.
ETHCC: THE YEAR BUILDERS AND BANKERS SHARE A STAGE
Europe's Biggest Ethereum Conference, Now in Cannes
In its ninth edition, EthCC has grown into something that would have looked unrecognizable to attendees of the early editions: more than 400 speakers, four days of technical talks and community-led events, an EthCC Week of side programming across Cannes, and a dedicated institutional forum called The Agora, co-hosted with market data firm Kaiko.
The Agora, running on March 31, is its own statement. Its participant list includes Standard Chartered, Euronext, DTCC, S&P Global, Bloomberg, and Tradeweb. These are not crypto-native names. They are the pillars of legacy financial market infrastructure, sitting down to discuss tokenization, on-chain settlement, perpetual futures, and stablecoin payment rails. The fact that this is happening inside EthCC is meaningful.
Ethereum's scaling upgrades, from EIP-4844 through the upcoming Fusaka hard fork, have collapsed transaction costs and dramatically improved throughput. JP Morgan, Aave, and Societe Generale-Forge are all building on-chain. Daily active addresses are climbing. The protocol argument is over. What remains is an adoption argument, and that is what Cannes 2026 is really about.
Beyond the institutional track, EthCC spans the full stack of what makes Ethereum work: zero-knowledge cryptography, rollup architecture, DeFi protocol development, governance, and the developer tooling that makes building on Web3 faster and less fragile. The conference is broad enough to be relevant whether you are a researcher, a founder, or a CMO asking where your next 100,000 users are going to come from.
For Addressable, EthCC matters because of that last category. The more seriously institutions engage with Ethereum, the more important the user acquisition layer becomes, because institutional products still need retail users, and retail users still need to be reached.
HACK SEASONS CONFERENCE: WHERE INSTITUTIONAL CAPITAL MEETS WEB3 REALITY
13 Editions of Honest Conversations at the Frontier
Running as a flagship side event of EthCC Week, the Hack Seasons Conference returns for its 13th edition on April 1 at the Canopy by Hilton Cannes. This is not a stage full of sponsored keynotes. HackSeasons has built a reputation for convening the people who are actually building institutional-grade Web3 infrastructure and asking them to be direct.
This edition's agenda covers the intersections that matter most right now: tokenized real-world assets, AI applications in blockchain, the evolution of CeFi and DeFi exchange infrastructure, and stablecoin payment adoption. Confirmed speakers include Andrew O'Neill (Managing Director, Digital Assets, S&P Global), Patrick Hansen (Senior Director EU Strategy & Policy, Circle), and Daniel Seifert (VP & Regional MD EMEA, Coinbase).
And at 16:55, Addressable Co-Founder Asaf Nadler takes the stage to moderate the panel that, in our view, is the most important conversation happening all week.
THE PANEL: THE QUESTION WEB3 NEEDS TO ANSWER
The framing is deliberately provocative. "Infrastructure Is Ready, Why Web3 Still Struggles to Reach Mass Adoption." Not "how do we build better infrastructure." Not "what comes after Ethereum." The assumption is that the rails exist. The problem is somewhere else.
Anyone who has spent time in this industry knows the feeling: you can point to scalable rollups, user-friendly wallets, sub-cent gas fees, and real yield from real protocols, and then watch the mainstream usage numbers and wonder what the gap actually is. Is it UX? Education? Regulation? Trust? The absence of a compelling enough use case for someone who does not already hold tokens?
These are not rhetorical questions for the people on this panel. They are operational problems. Asaf will be joined by five people building across the most critical layers of the stack:
This is not a panel of people who will give safe answers. These are the builders who know exactly where the friction is, because they are the ones trying to reduce it. Asaf will be pushing on the real question: if the rails are ready, why is the train not full?
At Addressable, this question is not abstract. Our platform exists precisely because great infrastructure alone does not create adoption, you still need to find, reach, and acquire the real people who will use it. The gap between "infrastructure is ready" and "users are here" is exactly the gap we are built to close. This panel is our kind of conversation.
WHAT WE ARE WATCHING AT ETHCC
Three Conversations That Will Define the Next Phase
Beyond the panel, here are the themes we are tracking most closely across the four days in Cannes:
ADDRESSABLE AT ETHCC: WHY WE SHOW UP
The Adoption Layer Is the Next Frontier
Addressable is the platform that closes the gap between Web3 protocol infrastructure and real-world user growth. We connect wallet-to-device intelligence with programmatic advertising to help exchanges, protocols, and wallets reach the verified on-chain users who are most likely to become active participants in their ecosystems.
Events like EthCC matter to us because every conversation about infrastructure is, underneath, a conversation about people. Whose wallets are these? Where do they come from? How do you reach them at the right moment, on the right channel, with the right message? Those are the questions we have built a platform to answer.
Asaf moderating the HackSeasons panel is not a PR exercise. It is the natural place for our Co-Founder to be: in the room where the most serious builders are asking the hardest version of the question that defines our product category. We will be listening hard, and we will be sharing what we hear.
The most interesting thing about EthCC is not the keynotes. It is the off-stage conversation, the realization, now broadly shared across the industry, that shipping great infrastructure is necessary but not sufficient. Growth is the next hard problem. That is the conversation Addressable has been having with our clients for three years. It is now the conversation the entire ecosystem is having.
