ETHCC 2026 recap: DeFi on an employment crisis great weather, great events, great vibes, but the landscape is shrinking and money is drying out going straight from NYC DAS to ETHCC, it is clear to me that DeFi is living an identity crisis on multiple fronts gone are the protocols run events where all their users go to feast at the expense of the treasury - in are the multi-hosted gatherings where most builders go all together but where you also meet the same people villas hosted by the few protocols that fundraised in 2025 and are still growing or soon to launch were the highlight of this year. the meta was less beach-front venues, more curated and researched places you look around for your friends that came last year, and notice always the same faces from the last ethcc - while some of the usual faces are gone and not seen any longer. events are curated but you can see they net is cast much larger because you can’t fill a space being hyper selective. places this year are smaller and the hyped events are not huge venues but small curated terraces very quickly at capacity about DeFi now, what’s clear like the cannes sky is that many of our frens are still around but they are looking for what their next chapter is going to look like. layoffs have hit the community with sparse victims, with chains and daos closing the faucets of infinite money i tell people i work in defi since 4+ years and the looks are not anymore of excitement but if surprise: the OGs are gone from the industry and almost everyone around is a new participant that came around recently and has no memory of what it once was the question they all these people have is: what’s next for our industry? defi founders and people with cool ideas are not the cool thing anymore, at least here in cannes, if we exclude the few hackathons that were not oversubscribed for sure but still manifested great ideas and use cases many defi projects sold or got acquired by corporate entities that are keeping the builders around but run on a different dream that the original founders dreams - but this is probably the bright side of the changes with merger and acquisitions keeping the light on on those long term builders so what about our frens in search for a new adventure? europe is DeFi. and defi needs europeans. DAS was full of suits having a job in tradfi working on adoption Cannes was full of DeFi builders and believers wondering what’s next for us tokenization is not the answer to everything, but it’s definitely leading the current narrative of tokenizing everything, and to work with institutions or companies that can help the industry scale defi is alive but in a rough shape, and we need to make sure our friends find a way to reinvent themselves. long live defi, let’s keep it alive and let’s keep growing defi in europe