For the 1889 World’s Fair, engineer Gustave Eiffel and his company designed and built a strange edifice that many Parisians disdained – what a ruinous addition to an otherwise pristine skyline, they thought.

People hated the prospect of it so much that a petition called “Artists against the Eiffel Tower" was sent to the The World’s Fair’s Minister of Works and Commissioner, Adolphe Alphand, and it was published by Le Temps on February 14, 1887.

“We, writers, painters, sculptors, architects and passionate devotees of the hitherto untouched beauty of Paris, protest with all our strength, with all our indignation in the name of slighted French taste, against the erection … of this useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower …”

But people get used to things. When it was built, it surpassed the Washington monument as the tallest human-made structure in the world – a title it held for 41 years until the Chrysler building surpassed it – and today, of course, the “Iron Lady" is synonymous with the city of lights, an iconic landmark to which millions flock each year. There it is, they say, Paris.

Last week, during EthCC (Ethereum Community Conference) in the French capital, the Eiffel Tower played host to a networking event with a host of startups including Safe, Request Finance, Monerium, Gnosis Chain, Gateway.fm, Gelato Network and Disco.xyz. I arrived at the Champs de Mars around 7pm, circling the walled landmark in search of the right entrance, wandering from door to door until I finally found a zigging line of crypto folk. I followed them into queues, onto funiculars and eventually into an event space about halfway up the tower.

Get your schmooze on

Inside, surrounded by spectacular views of a still mostly unencumbered skyline, small groups chatted amongst themselves, drinks in hand, plotting about things like digital wallets and account abstraction. Conveniently, the event followed an afternoon in which Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin detailed a history of account abstraction, a densely technical chronology of the feature’s circuitous path toward being – so dense that I left the talk with the same question I went in with: “What is account abstraction?”

Finding myself in the perfect place to get an answer, I struck up a conversation with a tech founder of a DeFi startup, who politely stooped to my technical height and explained that it’s a method of authentication that doesn’t rely on public or private keys. It eradicates one of crypto’s fatal flaws – that losing your seed phrase means losing access to your wallet. Today, there are things like social recovery – where friends can help you rescue your digital wallet – and biometric authentication. Pretty cool.

Shortly after, Stefan George, the co-founder and chief technical officer of Gnosis, stepped to the stage to interrupt the chatter of the crowded room, briefing us on the Eiffel Tower’s construction. "Gustave Eiffel financed much of it himself,” he said to exhibit the resilience one needs to build something so grand, especially in the face of adversity. "If you have conviction, you can literally build and do whatever you want."

When the tower was first built, Eiffel invited Thomas Edison to his private apartment at the top, where Edison presented him with one of his phonographs, a new invention and one of the many highlights of the exposition. And it was innovation that kept the tower standing. The Eiffel Tower only had a permit to stand for 20 years, so in 1909, ownership would revert to the City of Paris. The city planned to tear it down, but by the end of its first two decades, it had already become an important location for radio telegraphy. Radio and digital television signals are transmitted from the tower today to this day.

Its reputation as a cradle of innovation persists, now a salon for folks at crypto’s vanguard who seek to follow in Eiffel’s resilient footsteps. George and the team at Gnosis Pay used EthCC to launch the world’s first decentralized payment network and self-custodial debit card – accepted everywhere Visa is. At the entrance to the party, he said during his talk, there was a QR code that earned scanners a non-fungible token (NFT) that would allow them to skip the waitlist for a free card.

Stefan George of Gnosis

While guests flocked to the code, Evin McMullen, chief executive officer at Disco.xyz, took the stage and gathered a cadre of thought leaders, preparing to moderate the first of the night’s two panels – this one with Safe Co-Founder Lukas Schor; Gelato Network Co-Founder Hilmar X; Gnosis Co-Founder ​Friederike Ernst; and Jesse Pollak, creator of Base, the new Coinbase-incubated layer two.  

“We’re building crypto products for crypto users,” Ernst said. “We need to have some kind of account abstraction to make things usable for regular people, to offer the equivalent experience of web2 products. At the end of the day, I'm a techie but I don't really care about the tech.”

“So how can account abstraction shorten the onboarding cycle?” McMullen asked.

“We saw three big challenges: it’s too expensive, not good enough identity tools and wallets are way too hard,” Pollak responded. “The threat of being able to mess something up like show your seed phrase, lose your wallet… that’s not a viable reality for 99.9 percent of the world, and maybe 99.9 percent of the people in this room. 

“We’re working toward the same peace of mind that's stored in a bank account, but it's protected by code and by the decentralization we all believe in – it’s on-chain summer.”

Our 2022 EthCC dispatch: EthCC Postcard: A Scorching Paris Proves a Thoughtful Backdrop to Ponder web3’s Potential, Marx and the Inexorable Death Clock

After some assenting nods to that pithy last declaration, McMullen asked for predictions for when smart contracts will overtake external owned accounts, which are user-controlled accounts associated with a private key.

“Vitalik gave a talk today and asked how many people had safes and 75 percent raised their hands,” Schor said. “Maybe they’re not their primary accounts but…”

“I've got 40 safes,” X chimed in, earning some laughs from the room.

“I'm not sure you're the average user,” Lukas said, smiling. “But I think we're going to reach a tipping point.”

“By the end of the decade, I think the whole world is going to be on-chain,” Pollak said. “I think it's going to happen way faster than any of us expect.”

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When we think about the Eiffel Tower, most of us probably think about it as a romantic embodiment of Belle Époque Paris, the era of elegance and sophistication for which the city is still renowned. Some see the tower as a tale of grit, temerity and a rare ‘against all odds’ assiduousness – exemplary of the power of conviction in building “whatever you want.”

Others likely see the tower as a symbol of hypocrisy, for the building was not only financed by Gustave Eiffel. The French bank, the Crédit Industriel et Commercial (CIC), was pitching in, and during the construction they were acquiring funds from predatory loans to the National Bank of Haiti. France forced Haiti’s government to compensate French slaveowners for lost income during the Haitian Revolution, requiring the Caribbean nation to pay the CIC and its partner almost half of all export taxes. Some of those funds were poured into the tower, choking Haiti’s economy while its oppressor built a symbol of French liberté.

And there are others who regard the tower in awe, for all of Gustave Eiffel’s innovative structural safety techniques that ensured the welfare of his builders and its future visitors. It’s that last one that might resonate most with account abstraction enthusiasts – security and infrastructure are paramount, after all.

C'est magnifique

But these are all real perspectives, held concurrently by different people around the world, and the tale of crypto is as varicolored. It’s a story of privilege, technical brilliance, perseverance, economic liberty, greed, vehement optimism and breakdowns in communication. 

Later in the evening, I was chatting with someone who had also struggled to find her way into the event. Getting to the Eiffel Tower today is a tortuous pursuit, we decided, beleaguered by too many paths and eager tourists. “It's kinda like crypto,” she said. “You don't know how to get in and you don't know where it's going to go exactly, but you kinda wanna be there because for whatever reason, it’s happening at the top of the Eiffel Tower.”