2026-04-10 –, Sihl (Y24-G-55)
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.
Suggested speakers for the panel to introduce and frame the conference:
- Josef Je (confirmed)
- Sabrina (confirmed)
- Theo B. (confirmed)
-Vyara (confirmed)
- Arnaud (confirmed)
- Victoria (confirmed)
- Isla (moderator)
Isla is the co-founder of Zuitzerland, a society sandbox and d/accelerator based in Switzerland. She's spent 10 years exploring the frontiers of capital allocation and is particularly excited by conviction and prediction markets.
Victoria spent a decade shaping policy before concluding that the more interesting governance experiments were happening on-chain. She's now co-founder of Zuitzerland, a network state and society sandbox in Switzerland, working to bring decentralized coordination principles into contact with real jurisdictions, real estate, and regulatory reality. She moves between crypto-native builders and the institutional world they're trying to reshape, and knows how both sides think
Vyara Savova is Senior Policy Lead at the European Ethereum Institute (EEI), formerly EUCI, a Brussels-based non-profit that promotes Ethereum as a core layer of public infrastructure for institutions across the EU and UK. A lawyer qualified in Bulgaria with an LL.M. in Human Rights from SOAS, University of London, she is also a PhD candidate researching privacy on-chain and the use of smart contracts as a legal and technological solution. Vyara has extensive experience in data protection, crypto regulation, and digital policy, and regularly contributes to European debates at the intersection of privacy, blockchain, and law.
I coordinate academic research at the Ethereum Foundation Academic Secretariat.
My last paper (2026) was titled "Digital Democracy in Decentralised Autonomous Organisations". Throughout 2018–2023, I was Governance Lead at Safe, a Gnosis spin-out and VitaDAO, an early DeSci DAO, contributed to Colony, DAOstack's Genesis DAO, DAO Incubator, Bundesblock, and explored the use of blockchain in international development cooperation at GIZ Blockchain Lab.