Why Switzerland Needs a Subnet, and Why It Matters Globally

Transcript

I now have the pleasure of introducing our final keynote for the morning. Uh it's Tierry Hess from Swiss Subnet who is coincidentally talking to us about the importance of subnets uh subnets in Switzerland and why we need a Swiss subnet. Thank you very much for the kind introduction. Good morning everyone and uh thank you very much for for staying before lunch. Um, why Switzerland needs a subnet and why it matters globally? So, first of all, quick show of hands. Who of you storage data outside of Europe?

Okay. And who of you uses cloud services and has never read the terms and conditions before? You're really professional because all have written the terms and condition. That's great. So in 2025, 150,000 customers of Coinbase got leaked. Data was exposed, right? But it was not a problem of crypto. It's a problem of how we store our data. The data is s centralized and not in our hands. And as you can see, it's not just Coinbase, right? I mean, this is a cherry picking of just a few brands, but we can see these are the big ones, right? We have T-Mobile, Facebook,

Microsoft, Marriott. All of those companies has been hacked in the past and our data was breached. But what if data was yours again? What we could flip the script and bring data into Switzerland into the Swiss Alps where they are secure. Make this make this image in your head. You have the you have your data and you bring them into the Swiss Alps, right? But today again the situation is different. We have a data centralization and this is a huge risk. Not owning your data today. So you it's it's really inconvenient, right? You have no control. You don't know where it is stored. It can be used. It can be

hacked. It can it's not censorship resistant. Right? So if somebody wants to censor something on your data, you would not even be aware, right? because you don't know where your data start. So not owning your data is a huge risk as of today. With Swiss subnet, we will flip this. Right? So let me introduce you into what is the Swiss subnet. Swiss subnet is built on the ICP text, the internet computer blockchain from definitity. As all of you know, definitity has a great great research team, one of the biggest in the world and they are doing a super job and what we are basically doing is we are leveraging the ICP tech stack and adding

the Swiss subnet. Right? So the infrastructure seamlessly combines the of a public blockchain but with the privacy advantages of a private blockchain environment. Think of the subnet to give you a bit more of how this looks like. Think of a subnet as private worlds which can be adapted to your needs. Right? So this is very use case agnostic. We have decentralized node providers.

ICP is completely decentralized, right? The ICP network. But you cannot control actually where your data lives, right? It's in the ICP network. And what we are doing is we have 13 node providers, 10 in Switzerland, three in Likenstein. I have already heard that this could be the smallest blockchain in the world with just three no provider. But together we built actually the foundation of the Swiss subnet and each of those node provider for example in Switzerland will be in different cantons. So we really split this into different warehouses.

So your data is really storage and this is why I make this image before with the Swiss Alps. I mean you could imagine to bring note providers into bunkers right close them down and even if there is a atomar explo exposition or something happens here in Switzerland God bless us that this will not happen but your data would be stored in within Switzerland and safe. We also have privacy enhancing features. What does this mean? So Swiss subnet supports confidential data operation using privacy enhancing cryptography.

Our CTO is here today. So I invite you to come. We have a booth downstairs. I invite you to come and pass by if you need more information. I don't want to go too deep into this topic because it becames quickly technical and he is the man to ask for this. Another discussion which we often have and get asked is scalability and performance. And this is not a problem at all. Using the ICP text stack, we have all the advantages of the public permissionless blockchain integrated into our Swiss subnet, which means speed, transaction costs, and transparency.

Right. Let me give you some other features which are very interesting. As mentioned, privacy and confidentiality is secure. We are using memory encryption and integrity protection powered by AMD. As said before, I will not go into details, but you can pass by and we're happy to explain this to you. We also work to be compliant under Swiss legal protection. So, your data will be under Swiss legal protection and you don't have to care about it because we take care of this.

And we have fully onchain ownership. I give you an example. I was talking once in a university and explained how NFT works right and there were one guy was he raised his hand and he said I don't use NFTs anymore I said why and he said look if I mint an NFT basically I have a transaction right I I have a transaction and in this transaction is the link stored but normally the image is not stored because of the size right it would explode actually so where is the image stored The image is stored on a centralized server and let's just imagine it's not it's not

fingerpointing but let's imagine OpenC crashed down. What do you have? You have your transaction. Congratulations. But try to sell your transaction because you don't have the the image is not there, right? It's it's two separate two separate databases. Why I give you this example? Because Swiss subnet is quite technical, right? and they try to give you some images to understand what we are doing. So what we are doing is we are keeping everything on chain. So if you have the transaction hash, if you have the transaction uh the the the public key, you actually own really if you have the private key, you actually really own what you have. It's it's on chain. It's here. And even if if the website shuts down, it it's still here any because it's on the blockchain,

right? Completely. So we have we eliminate off-chain dependencies for true asset performance. Another interesting feature is that we are crosschain we have crosschain composibility. So we seamless integrate with Bitcoin, Salana, Ethereum. So we are not isolated to just one ecosystem because this is something which we have heard in the past all the time again and again and again. We are being building up silos but then they are not interoperable, right? You have to bridge assets, you have to bring them to the other chain, etc., etc. And the Swiss subnet integrates seamlessly into uh different blockchain ecosystems, right?

So, we give you the freedom of to choose on which chain you would like to work. I mentioned this before. Um, we are working towards full compliancy, right? So, we have privacy aligned architecture. We built towards regulatory standards and to cross juris jurisdiction legal clarity. We want to keep our customers and their data as safe as possible and under the regulatory framework which we know already today and the regulatory frameworks which will came out in the future.

We will also propose uh the right of to be forgotten. This is something which you normally don't find on blockchain because blockchains are here and you have an encryption and if you want to be it forgotten it's it's not possible right but we have found a solution that we are able to prop propose you this functionality while using the Swiss You may ask yourself who trusts Swiss subnet. So as to of today um we are in discussion with fintex startups they have smart contracts government documents and they want to keep this as safe as possible and they want to know where this stored right they really want to have this confirmation and there are sitting our customers. So we are talking

with individuals. We are talking to high volume enterprises. Um they want to have security first, scalability first and trust into a technology infrastructure so that they can also give the trust to their customers back. So there we are in a in different discussions. We are not live yet. The go live is planned for in a few months. But we already have a lot of discussion in term of use cases which are very interesting because it shows that the this need is here the market and the need is here. So people are looking for a solution for this.

What is important is that the platform can also scale. So demanding workloads is not a problem at all to be run on the blockchain of uh ICP and the Swiss You can see a few pictures here. security, compliance, privacy, interoperability and credentials. And what we are doing is we are offering you all of this not as different plugins but as the Swiss subnet we could also call it the Swiss standard, right? The the Swiss made standard. So you don't have to care about all those different tasks separately. We offer you this into into one solution. So no plug-in picking

taking care of different applications too complex they are not interoperable you will have day-to-day problems while using it because there is an update there's an update it's not running no we really give you and it's built in the solution um of the Swiss subnet and this has a very transformative potential of blockchain technology because so far blockchain was just like a database right it was It was not more and less. But what we can offer you is really compliance, privacy, interoperability to other blockchains. And I think this opens rooms for completely new use cases.

The future is data ownership. I don't know if you remember I asked you before where you store your data and you you you you show it by hands but imagine where you already have given your data by using your smartphone your computer filling out forms etc etc I I think you can't remember where everywhere you did this right and what you also don't know is what they are doing with your data so owning your data is not just a feature a nice to have it it will be the future and now imagine yourself this future in this beautiful country with the mountains. We bring this into the Swiss Alps.

So Switzerland has long stand for trust, independency, neutrality. And what we are doing with Swiss subnet is we bring this legacy into the digital world because in a digital world security begins with sovereignity and I hope you agree with this. Thank you very much for your attention. I invite you to come by our booth. We are just downstairs. You come by and I would be happy to have some talks with you guys.

Thank you very much.