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.

Ethereum has capital, but it still lacks a repeatable mechanism for turning frontier ideas into real teams, real products, and long-term staying power. This talk introduces a d/combinator: a decentralized, cohort-based accelerator aligned with d/acc, built the Swiss way — credible neutrality, subsidiarity, and cooperative governance as coordination infrastructure. Combining pop-up villages for high-signal selection with a permanent Swiss hub for alumni loops and institutional memory, the model is privacy- and cypherpunk-first (ZK, verifiability, user sovereignty). It’s not a concept deck: it’s already happening, and it’s designed to compound.

Crypto Valley gave the world one of its first credible blockchain ecosystems — a cluster of foundations, protocols, and regulatory firsts that put Zug and Zürich on the global map. A decade in, the picture is more complicated. Switzerland punches above its weight in protocol infrastructure and institutional credibility, yet many builders describe a missing layer: the everyday community gravity that makes cities like Lisbon, Berlin, or Singapore feel alive for crypto-natives. Switzerland hosts Davos, CV Summit, EthZüri, and dozens of other events — yet builders who live and work here often say they only run into each other at conferences abroad, not at home. The talent is here; the togetherness often isn't.

This workshop flips the usual panel format. After a short scene-setting from community organisers working to change the local landscape, we open the floor: what's your high point of building in Switzerland? Your low? What would make you stay — or come back? The goal is to leave the room with an honest, builder-sourced picture of what community organisations and local Ethereum groups can concretely do to strengthen the ecosystem over the next decade. Bring your frustrations, your ideas, and your energy — this one is as much yours as ours.

It's a wrap!