Public, permissionless blockchains increasingly function as foundational digital infrastructure, yet they sit in tension with key interpretative assumptions in EU data protection law. Recent developments-particularly the EDPB’s draft Guidelines 02/2025 and the European Commission’s Digital Omnibus proposal-have exposed structural frictions around pseudonymity, automated processing, and the allocation of responsibility in decentralised systems. These tensions mirror broader doctrinal concerns already recognised by the Court of Justice, notably in the EDPS v SRB case. This panel interrogates whether current GDPR interpretations can be meaningfully extended to protocol-level blockchain activity. Using Ethereum as an example of widely deployed public infrastructure, the discussion brings together legal, policy, and infrastructure perspectives to examine the limits of existing interpretative approaches and to consider how EU data protection rules can remain enforceable while accounting for the realities of decentralised infrastructure.