A few words to start the conference!

As AI capabilities accelerate and questions of digital sovereignty sharpen across Europe, Switzerland is uniquely positioned to lead the continent's response — a model designed from a place that has practised decentralised coordination since 1291.

The Ethereum Foundation's new mandate declares its CROPS principles — censorship resistance, open-source, privacy, and security — as preconditions, not aspirations, while betting that the Foundation's success will be measured by how unnecessary it becomes. This subtraction philosophy converges with Switzerland's own trajectory: the EMBAG law mandating open-source government software, the Greater Zürich Area hosting Europe's densest AI cluster, and a growing network-society movement using seven centuries of direct democracy and cantonal sovereignty as a sandbox for experimentation with Vitalik Buterin's d/acc framework.

The result could become a credible European blueprint for sanctuary technologies — ZK proofs, decentralised identity, encrypted computation, onchain mortgages, DAO coordination primitives, community owned technology hubs and accelerators — all built to protect individual agency and local sovereignty, rather than concentrate control.

This panel brings together builders, researchers, and policy minds to ask whether Switzerland can pioneer the model that the rest of Europe will need: how Ethereum protocol development, DAO governance, and sanctuary technologies can mature into the defensive infrastructure for an open continent — and what Switzerland's role can be over the next decade.

It's a wrap!