Jerome de Tychey (Ethereum France) - EthCC[9] Closing Ceremony

Um Oh, I forgot the clicker, I think. Uh bump. Got it. Can you believe we've been doing this for 9 years? Yeah.

Yep, 9 years. 9 years. Ladies and gentlemen, this was ECC number nine. You heard it already. Yes, we are Ethereum France, we're a nonprofit.

We'd love to collaborate with you. We are open for collaboration. Uh please give us feedback. We hear, we learn, we try to improve. We worked very hard to make this week a success for everyone, and we hope uh you had as much fun participating than we had organizing and participating a little bit as well.

Um Yeah, come talk to us. That's important. Uh last year your main feedback was it was too hot. I hope this year was okay. Um again, um I've been saying that a lot in my opening talk.

ECC is your public good. It's um ever evolving event. Uh we want you to be involved. Uh and one thing we tried to do this year, uh a little bit more than last year, is to bring in inside events. So, we had seven, uh six inside the palace and one in front, our first um institutional institutional events at the Agora.

We want to do that more next year. So, if you're organizing a side event, if you're organizing something, just come talk to us. Just let us know that you are here, that you would like help. Uh we want to make this success again for everyone. I'm I'm sure um you had a good time.

I'm sure you find things you expected, things you didn't expected, and we definitely hope um to see you last year next year because we're going to celebrate our 10 years anniversary, and it wouldn't be anything without uh our dear attendees coming to the conference. Um What does it mean to organize a nonprofit conference? You aim to be break even, and eventually you are a little bit above break even, so you can reinvest for next year. So, we're going to make next year even bigger, and in order for next year to be a success as much as it is for this year, we will need sponsor. So, I'm going to thank our sponsors.

Uh there are many of them this uh this year, um but I will talk about them a little bit more uh in the in the next slides. Um ECC is here, um and it's a success because we have returning speakers as well. People that we see almost every year, uh people that care to come uh as much as you care to take a ticket and come, people that come to uh share what they have been working on, share what they think. Uh it's always a pleasure to see uh familiar faces every year, uh people that commit to come really early early in advance, uh make their coming known, uh tell their friends and team to come as well, and it's um always delightful to see that. We are blessed at ECC to have a an excellent team and partners, the best of the best.

Some of them some of them that we've been working on for almost 9 years. I think Kabuki we've been working with them since the very beginning. Yep. Shout out. Uh GL Events, the wonderful core team of ECC that you see here, uh 316 colors, and of course the Palais des Festivals de Cannes.

Uh Thank you. In the conference, there's a heartbeat. All the the blood is flowing everywhere. It's the volunteers. Thank you, guys.

Um many of them are students, people that are curious about Ethereum, people that are uh members of of Ethereum France, people that just want to discover uh what this uh holy ecosystem is, and we are super happy to welcome them every every year. Uh right after this presentation, I would love to have you guys come on stage. I'll do a another another uh round so we can come on stage and we can make a big group pictures like we do every year. Um here are some some flashbacks about last year. The the vibe of the community coming at ECC was okay-ish, not not the best of the best.

We had a rough year 2024 and 2025. Um and I think like coming out of ECC was top notch. Uh everybody was pumped and uh super happy of having seen the sun, having seen uh their friends, and uh realizing what we were actually here for. Many were dubious about our choices regarding Cannes, uh but I think most of you were convinced afterwards, otherwise you wouldn't have come back, I guess. For a week, the city becomes a village, a village where we meet our friends, where we see each others, and we we share good time.

I I put an emphasis last year about how Ethereum is an evidence, um and I started to look at the number that matters for adoption. Uh stable coins, uh W A, um fights that are worth fighting for, um supporting people that write open source code, um promoting privacy and empowerment empowering uh tools regarding your financial freedoms and such. Um and just updating the numbers were uh a bit dull. I would have just spilled some numbers and numbers to see like, "Hey, we are continuing to perform super well. Like you should be super optimistic for what's up."

Um and also I started to dig in in in old slides, and one of my kids told me like, "Hey, this is cool. This looks like a zipper." Does it? A little bit. Those jaws that you just form like this.

So, I I derailed about zippers, and I thought it was not not too bad of an idea to tell you a little bit about zippers. Have you ever heard about zippers? Yeah, of course. Everybody has a zipper, right? You you've met some zippers in the past, right?

So, what about zippers? Initially, zippers were introduced as the technology that will replace buttons, laces, brushes, hooks and eyes, and things. It was a very very very very messy innovation story. It all started the middle of the 19th century uh with the very inventor of the sewing machine patenting the first automatic clothing uh closure system that was really never commercialized. And then flash forward to the end of the century, you had a first model of uh of a proper zipper.

It's the one on the left here with lots of hooks that get into things like it would be a uh a bit scary to zip it up, right? And eventually the first real zipper was introduced in 1913 by Gideon Sundback. So, at this stage, um this was the this was the innovation. Like, "Look, we are able to very speedily zip up, and the thing is closed. Uh it's much better than the button, it's better than the laces, it goes just fast.

It goes just fast." But the problem is in their early days, the zipper were facing a very very very tough competition. The installed industry of the buttons. Yeah. For centuries, the buttons were there.

They were there, and they were there to stay. Uh simplicity and reliability, uh many intermediaries were feeding on this industry, right? Uh cheap and easy to repair. Uh everybody knows how to use a button. Uh you lose a button, you just get another button, and that you you get it sewing.

The manufacturing ecosystem was super simple for the buttons. While for the zipper, uh as you would imagine in the 19th century, you have to nail the thing and manually strip the thing and make sure that everything is just well adjusted and so on. Plus the the initial market fit that the uh industry of the zipper found was uh the zipper behind the skirt. Like very practical. That's something you can zip, it it stays in the same place.

The problem was of course that uh you have to wash your skirt sometime, and uh the zipper rusts. So, you had to de-sew the thing and re-sew the thing and so on. So, it wasn't really practical, and everybody was hating them. So, everybody was making fun of them for decades. Like, "It's not secure.

It's it's gimmicky and risky. Look, yeah, it's cool you can zip fast, but yeah, whatever. Who cares about the zipper anyway?" And then surprisingly, they slowly found its product market fit in various portions of garments, and it upgraded to different things. Yet, the button factory uh the the button factories and industry fought hard against this.

So, the path for adoption for zippers was um uh find a niche foothold first, and then expand, accelerate, uh add new flavors, add new materials inside, and eventually create new applications for your zipper. The boots and tobacco pouches were the initial uh success for the zipper. Uh yeah, you zip your tobacco pouch, and you don't lose your tobacco. Uh you have your boots, uh Goodyear, um Goodrich, sorry. Started to commercialize those uh those boots that you zip up, and uh they are staying in place, no problem.

They actually introduced the term zipper at this uh at this stage by just describing how uh fast it was. The the first tryout to modernize the the term was hookless hookers, and they abandoned it for zipper. Yeah. Uh children clothing, very practical. You just zip it up and it's done.

Uh and then there was a fashion breakthrough, like the the very last mile where the button industry was trying to say like zipper are unsecure. It was the battle of the fly, the portion of your pants that cover your crotch. So like no no one wants a zipper there. Come on. It's too risky.

And they were telling this story about the groom meeting the the fiance the fiance parents and having the tablecloth lock into the zipper and just coming up like all of those stories, like things that doesn't exist anymore. I hope. Um yes. Trying to prevent that the zipper industry finally finds its success. And then when security and speed started to really matter in the World War II, it was evident.

We wanted zippers everywhere. Everywhere and everywhere. And this is where it got really adopted because it was perceived as modern. The modernity is where zipper where we need to have zippers, of course. It wouldn't be fair to talk about zippers without the elephant in the room, the the most successful zipper company ever, YKK.

Uh you probably have seen those YKK words. It's a Yoshida Kogyo Kabushiki, uh if I'm pronouncing it right, um a company from Japan that started right after the um patent was expired in the '30s and started to make zippers first by hand to really understand how the zippers were made and then bought some uh US-made uh machines, they improved them, and they focused on one single thing that will matter all along. Quality. The quality of your zippers, the quality of your block space. Eventually, the new use cases appeared, new use cases that we are proud to have today.

We just launched a new mission to go on the moon. Zippers are on spacesuits. Zippers are on deep sea diving um suits. They're also used for building temporary aircraft hangars. They you zip it up and it's protecting your aircraft from the sandstorm and such.

So what about this? Um Quo vadis today? Let's look up and look ahead. We have had 14 years of very elegant solution that many people told us like look you're reinventing the wheel, we don't need that. Come on.

Uh we already have something that work. It may be not as secure, it may be not as um as as quick to close and so on, but it's it's it's practical. We know about it. We know how to use it. This elegant solution like we already solved the problem it's trying to solve.

Well, we're starting to solve it better. Very much. And also there are many more applications to come. Look at where we are right now. We have radical social innovations, uh something you don't see anywhere else with universal basic incomes, different flavors, Gnosis world.

Um decentralized core system with Kleros, community building and postcards that you can carry all over the the world with POAP. Um Are the institution really coming? Yeah, sure. Look at Money Reams, stablecoins in euro. Forge, stablecoins in euro also, but coming from a very large bank.

Tokenized stocks, X stocks, of course. What is the right place for AI? Is is anyone really using AI and blockchain? Yeah, of course. Let it be the stage, CoinFello, Cushion Platform, and so on.

But you need to secure the keys because we are signing on the blockchain, and signing on the blockchain, especially if you put an AI in the mix, uh can be pretty tricky. Well, we have a very very thriving industry in the wallet space, whether it is hardware or software based. Trezor owned by Ledger, Safe Keep Wallet, BitGo, and Status. Is the future of finance being built on blockchain? Yeah, definitely.

There is no alternative currently. Whether you want to onboard uh on a ramp, whether you want to trade, whether you want to do something close to the decentralized finance, well, everything is here from Aave to Lido to Wild Card Finance, Aztec Protocol, Merkle et al., Cropper, Nexus Mutual, Cross Chain. Like zip up. Going to have a trouble reading them all.

Um but anyway, uh I like my zipper green. I like my zipper uh in metal. I like my zipper that doesn't rust. I don't trust this kind of zipper because I don't know who the zipper maker is. You care for specific network features?

You care for specific consensuses? You care for specific privacy features, specific uh ZK features, or whatever? Uh there are many different flavors where you find the EVM zippers, whereas it's on Canton, Brevis, Zcash, Linear, Aztec, Hedera Hashgraph, Hermez, Aztec Neutron. Um those are all very very good zippers as well that you can apply. You need some support to grow your business?

We have supporters in this field that are specialized for our industry. Yeah, Global has been with us for years, Galxe, um Galaxy, uh Plexus, Status Crypto. Or you need resilient infrastructure for your node, for um your applications, it's here. It's all over. Sentiment, Water Reminder, you got I almost you got the you got the the swag at the at their booth.

QuickNode, The Graph, Oasis Network. Yeah. But we need secure stuff. Yeah, you want some audits? It's there as well.

Our industry is huge. Veridise, Sigma Prime, Dedaub, and so on. And many talks about security at the conference. And you going to be tackling hard engineering problems, and you need help with the top tier teams? Well, Wonderland is here for you.

Like we are here. We're here to stay. And this elegant solution and the thing we've built, there are many more to come. You have to realize right now that it's us the modernity. We are at the intersection of life-changing technological change from quantum proofness, from the revolution of AI agents, from the credible neutrality in a network that you cannot weaponize that we embody.

This is where we're winning. This is where we are the modernity that everybody has been looking for and everybody will be playing around for the next 20 years. So look up and look ahead, the future is very bright. Here you go.

[music]

Super cool.

[applause]

So what's next? The afterparty, of course. 8:30, bring your badge, check your email. Uh 8:30, first come first serve. Um yeah, I hope to see you later.

I'll be there. But also we have a hackathon going on this weekend uh by ETH Global, like we did last year. Excellent hackathon. I really feel staying the weekend, do pass by the ETH Global hackathon. And what's next, of course?

Our 10-year anniversary. Next year in April again, a little bit later, so a little bit warmer, but not too much. And uh and yeah, many many many many souvenirs to share with you uh at this 10-year anniversary. I hope you'll come. I hope you had a good time.

And yeah, see you next year, folks. Thank you for making it to see what it is.

[applause]

Hey volunteers, come on up.

[music]

Mhm.