2026-04-10 –, Limmat (Y15-G-60)
Walk into almost any web3 event in Zurich and count the developers. Then count the salespeople, the investors, and the BD reps. The ratio will tell you everything you need to know about why Swiss builders feel alone in a country with nearly 900 blockchain companies.
We surveyed 70+ Swiss web3 builders and the picture was sharper than we expected: 43% feel isolated from their tech community, 79% want to work alongside peers regularly, and 95% are frustrated with current events. The talent is here. The community is not.
This talk is about that gap, and what it would take to close it. The argument is simple: communities don't just happen. They have to be designed, with deliberate choices about who's in the room, what gets discussed, who pays for it, and who decides what comes next. I'll share what the survey revealed about how Swiss builders actually want to spend time together, and the principles we think any builder community has to commit to in order to stay one: community-first, curated, affordable, tech-agnostic.
Then I'll show how we're putting those principles into practice with Z3, the non-profit community space we're opening in Zurich in H2 2026, and the honest trade-offs we're running into along the way.
Adrian is a Security & AI Researcher at Quantstamp, where he's worked since 2022. He holds an MS in Computer Science from Columbia University, where he served on the board of Blockchain@Columbia. Adrian also co-founded the TUM Blockchain Club, which has since grown into Europe's leading university blockchain community.
As a builder in Switzerland, Adrian and fellow community members kept running into the same problem: there was no neutral, builder-focused space to connect with peers. What started as solving a problem for a few turned into Zurich3 - an initiative to give Switzerland's entire builder community a permanent home.