CryptoCanal | What Happened to the Cypherpunk Dream? - Eleonore Blanc | Common S3nse - 2026

A few comments from from me in the beginning. I'll just get the logistics out and then I pinky swear I'll get into the good stuff. So, first, stay in the loop because I had a comment I think 3 years ago where someone was like, "I didn't even know there was a second stage." So, please don't be that person and make sure to know that we have this stage for content and the Vitalik stage. The Vitalik stage is a bit of a mission.

You have to cross the Jeans Factory and once you cross the Jeans Factory on the other side, you have more amazing content. So, have a look at the map. I believe in you. If you can hack and build and have uh self-custody of your funds, you will figure out everything here. And and for those who've joined ETHDenver the previous years, that was a maze.

That was five floors of maze and where people could hide and lose themselves. But basically, where you entered, where the other registration, that's where you're going to see a few pearls. The best pearls are projects that Crypto Can Now selected to feature and promote and that are to my and to my best of knowledge doing their best to build really good products. You will also find the Superteam Netherlands uh team there. And I see them also in the front row here, so raise your hand.

Woohoo! We also They also organized the Solana Starter Village this week, so thank you so much for kicking off the hackathon. Then, the crew and speaker lounge, go up the stairs and that's your little nook to be all private and comfy and enjoy the art gallery. That's when you're in the in the corridor there. That's when you bifurcate and you can find the Vitalik stage or here the Satoshi stage.

Now, if you continue outside, you will step into the Canary Club, and that's where you will find Swarm people, who are a hackathon partner, so thank you Swarm for being with us. The Zano pool, those are all the crazy people that you'll find upstairs. Uh I'm pretty I haven't had a look yet, but I was told that there were some inflatable balloons and things, so I look forward. And the Zcash team is at the bottom of the stairs. In front of the Zcash booth, you have the Canary Club bar, where you can buy anything from the menu with crypto.

So, just so you know, and you can also do that at the Fento healthy Mexican option at the Food Hall. Thank you, Dorian, for allowing peer-to-peer payments in the Food Hall. Woo! Tara, who's amazing and who's helped me put Common Sense together, also has a little surprise for you. So, if you tweet from the What did you write?

If you tweet from the heart, come and find her, and you will have a little surprise. So, that's a little Tara a little Tara extra. Any questions before I get into it? Amazing. I wanted to open this talk because I wanted to share a few thoughts with you guys.

And the first one is where where did the cypher come cypherpunk dream come from, right? Who has read here the cypherpunk manifesto? Okay. Okay, a few hands. You guys have to read it.

1993, Eric Hughes writes the cypherpunk manifesto. What did he say? What did they mention? He mentions electronic payments. We have that.

He mentions cryptography. We have that. They mention the ability to reveal yourself to the world. We're working on that. And that's the problem, right?

If Eric Hughes, who sadly passed away, and many Cypherpunks that allowed the internet as we know it today to exist and to be used by all. If one of those Cypherpunks that Satoshi emailed a few years ago stepped here stepped into this into this venue and looked around, they'd probably think we've won. Right? We have it. We have Eric Hughes didn't know about Bitcoin.

Right? We have Bitcoin today. We have electronic peer-to-peer money for the world. Freedom money for the world that anybody can permission permissionlessly transact with and have full custody over. We are sovereign.

We are actually we are able to be sovereign. We have the luxury to have all the technology today to be free. We've created it. The technology is here. You'll see it over the next few days and the next two stages and all the wonderful wonderful speakers that are coming to this event and that are sharing your knowledge with you.

We have it. We have ZK. We have FHE. We have TEE. We have MPC.

We have all of the good stuff to stay private. And we have privacy coins, dedicated privacy coins. We've done better than Bitcoin. We took Bitcoin and we added features and we added smart contracts and we made sure that we didn't only have A to B, we had programmability. And all of that Eric Hughes and the Cypherpunks in the 1990s could not have dreamed about it.

But we're living it. We're literally living the Cypherpunk dream. Isn't that beautiful? Can't we appreciate it? Can't we celebrate it?

We're at that stage in life in an in an art industry where it's all possible. But but and that's where it gets a bit a bit grim, right? We have it all. We here know it. We, maybe in this room, are very lucky users.

And a lot of the people in the world who need it, thankfully, hopefully, have access to it. But at the same time, we've never had more surveillance. I don't forget. I lived through COVID. We never had more dystopian feeling of an authoritarian government even here in our safe democracies stamping down and deciding what people could do, where people could go, and how people could spend their money.

Oh, you want to support the Canadian truckers? We'll shut that down. Oh, you want to support Alexey Pertsev and the Tornado Cash developers? No, you can't do that on the normal platforms. You can't We won't allow it.

We'll remove you. Right? Iran shut the internet down for 3 months this year. 3 months no internet for all of Iran. Hundreds of millions of people cut off.

And that's why actually on day two, Lea is doing a presentation on mesh networks because I want us to learn more about this. I want us to learn more to be more resilient and to have more even more freedom, basically. We have it all, but I think we can do better. We can do better because even though the Cypherpunk dream, we are living it. We are literally living the Cypherpunk manifesto day today.

It's not a given. It's not something that we have for sure. It is something that can be taken away, and it is something that we need to keep keep fighting for. So, it's no joke, and I know this sounds a bit a bit heavy, but I wanted to sort of embed the gravitas of common sense. I could have gone through a very different route to organizing this event.

I was told I should. Don't Don't do do type of event. It's It's It's not really it's not what the industry's going for, right? We should talk about tokenization and real world assets and how the institutions are here and celebrate Visa and MasterCard settling billions in stablecoin for us. I like it.

Don't get me wrong. I'm happy crypto's normalized. We have it. People are using it and institutions and billions are coming into this industry. But that's not my dream.

That's not the Cypherpunk dream. That's great for the industry. That's positive. That's liquidity. That's validation.

We We're not just weirdos playing with internet money. No, that actually they realize that there's value in this. But in the same time that we foresee recognition, at the same time that the institutions rolled in and stopped dismissing it and added cryptocurrency as a, you know, as a a different digital assets to invest in, we also lost a little bit of our soul. And we forgot what what is the important part in this dream. And this is why you will not see tokenization talks and you will not see anything about real world assets because that's boring.

I mean, it's I mean, don't get me wrong. Other people out there are building it and it's nice. But that's not the fun stuff. Real world assets, there's always a middleman in between. The moment you connect some property, some table or whatever, whenever, or gold, or whatever you're tokenizing, you have a middleman who is now proving that that real world asset is now linked to a blockchain.

I'm not interested in that. I'm interested in the permissionlessness, the censorship resistance, the privacy. I want that. I want that dream. And this is why this event is built around that common sense, because I believe that privacy is common sense.

That censorship resistance is is common sense. That self-custody is common sense. And that you should have the right to reveal yourself to the world, and that you should have the right to have your financial privacy. Just like fiat has financial privacy. If we're going to replace fiat, we should be better.

And on that note, I'm sure you saw the Wi-Fi password. I'll just leave that taxation is theft. And that fiat is a scam. Enjoy all these wonderful panels, discussions that we have today. I'm honored to have brought together such amazing builders that are making sure that the Cypherpunk dream remains alive and well, and it is here at Common Sense in Amsterdam.

Thank you.