Privacy as security: Common S3nse 2026 in sixteen interviews

The sentence follows me around De Hallen for the two days of Common S3nse 2026. A panel says it on Friday morning, and by Saturday afternoon sixteen guests in the same chair have each handed it back to me meaning something different. Privacy is security. A philosopher from Nym means metadata, a Winklevoss analyst means Bitcoin’s ledger, a Belgian card maker means a wallet with no screen, and a Dutch MP means the tools a state now holds. This is how the sixteen conversations connect, in the order they collided.

Sixteen interviews, two days; every one is linked below and collected in the playlist.

Friday morning at Common S3nse 2026

The Wi-Fi network is called taxation is theft and the password is fiat is a scam, which tells me what kind of building I am in before anyone sits down. Casey Ford sits down first. He runs communications at Nym, holds a PhD in philosophy, and is giving a talk the next morning about what he calls techno-fascism. I ask him what Nym is for, and he starts by taking apart the product category his own employer competes in. A conventional VPN stands between you and the site you want, and to do that it has to receive everything first.

in order to have that kind of protection, that coat, you have to first give all of your data to the VPN company

Casey Ford, Head of Communications, Nym

So the privacy you bought arrives after you have surrendered the thing you were protecting, and everything then rests on the character of one company. HTTPS hides the contents of most pages from that company. It cannot hide the pairing of who you are and where you went, and that pairing is what a data broker pays for. Nym’s answer is to own nothing that could be asked.

We never handle your data. We own no infrastructure that routes your traffic.

Casey Ford, Head of Communications, Nym

Two servers, run by independent operators paid in NYM tokens, so the first sees your address, the second sees your destination and no single desk holds both. That is Ford’s meaning of the sentence: security is the absence of a place where the pairing can be served with a court order. He volunteers the cost unprompted, which over two days turns out to be the habit of the guests I quote most. The more anonymity the network gives you, he says, the slower it runs.

Maxime Desalle gives the sentence its sharpest edge. He is an investment analyst at Winklevoss Capital, his brief there is Zcash, and he says at once that he is talking his book. Then he says the line about the asset his employer’s founders are famous for holding.

what most people don’t understand is that Bitcoin is effectively a surveillance machine, which is very sad. I would actually love it if that were not the case

Maxime Desalle, Investment Analyst, Winklevoss Capital

with AI and growing compute, it becomes easier and easier to pattern match transactions in a pseudonymous network like Bitcoin is. And so pseudonymity and just obfuscation in general is on borrowed time

Maxime Desalle, Investment Analyst, Winklevoss Capital

A transaction you made in 2019 sits on the ledger unchanged, waiting for whichever model can read it in 2029. That is the second meaning of the sentence, and it is about time rather than court orders. He puts the burden of proof where nobody else at the event puts it.

the burden is on the transparency maxis to justify why a network should be transparent because from a security perspective, privacy will always be more secure

Maxime Desalle, Investment Analyst, Winklevoss Capital

Sebastien Guillemot has come off a Friday morning panel where someone said the transparency maximalists should accept that privacy equals security, and I ask him, as the person who has to build it, how true that is. He is the CTO of the Midnight Foundation, the chain from the Cardano camp whose mainnet produced its genesis block on 17 March 2026, and his first answer is about a trade rather than a government.

if everything is overly transparent, the bad actors know exactly what you’re doing before it even happens, and they can plan ahead to give the worst deal possible and take as much of your money as they can

Sebastien Guillemot, CTO, Midnight Foundation

Ford means the pairing, Desalle means the ledger and Guillemot means the order book, which is the meaning a regulator can hear because it is about fairness. Nobody in the chair so far disagrees with anybody else, and that does not last.

Transparency is the attack surface

Guillemot’s second answer is the one I keep thinking about. Quantum computers, he says, may come online in the next few years, and the fix for a watched wallet is to migrate to new cryptography. Then he describes the wallet nobody watches: coins bought for a child, to be handed over at eighteen, sitting still for a decade while nobody rotates a key or reads an upgrade notice.

the fact that you have this privacy means that even if an attacker comes out with a new algorithm, a new kind of computer or whatever, they don’t actually know where your funds are and how to even attack you in the first place or the fact that you even exist in the first place

Sebastien Guillemot, CTO, Midnight Foundation

That is a discoverability argument, the narrowest and most durable version of the sentence I hear all weekend: funds stay hackable in principle and hard to find in practice, and the people holding the coins do not get told when the algorithm changes. Martin Strobl, a researcher at Logos, the stack that wants to run a whole society off the open internet, comes to the chair straight from a panel and gives the argument an address outside crypto.

if you look at private equity trades, 40% of them are happening in the dark pools, which means like private execution that is not public

Martin Strobl, Researcher, Logos

FINRA’s transparency reporting for alternative trading systems and other off-exchange venues has been cited as placing off-exchange trading near 40 percent of US equity volume in early 2026, which is the order of magnitude he means. Private execution is something the largest market in the world already pays for, every day, and Strobl treats that as the settled answer to a question crypto is still arguing about. Logos ships its stack as a launcher you run on your own hardware, without a browser, because a browser leaks a fingerprint before you sign anything, and he says first that Logos is not for everyone. What he says next explains how a privacy stack can carry compliant applications without eating itself.

a compliant use can increase the anonymity set

Martin Strobl, Researcher, Logos

Anonymity is a shared resource, and every extra participant subsidises everyone else’s cover. Reuben Yap co-founded the privacy coin Firo, practised law for ten years before that, and wears a black t-shirt reading CITIZENS NOT SUSPECTS. I expect a protocol conversation. He gives me a receipt from his own life instead: a Malaysian bank, he says, froze an account of his for a year after a stablecoin payment reached him from someone who had scammed a third party, and the police cleared him while the freeze ran on.

And my bank account was frozen for an entire year.

Reuben Yap, co-founder, Firo

Nobody accused him of anything; he was proximate to something, and the compliance system handles that category by freezing first. That is his meaning of the sentence, and it is about power. He points at his chest to deliver the line the shirt has been carrying all along.

we are citizens, not suspects

Reuben Yap, co-founder, Firo

Then he picks an argument with his own side, and names the escape hatch the industry keeps pointing at.

But realistically, not many people use view keys. Not many people know what it is.

Reuben Yap, co-founder, Firo

A view key lets you hand an auditor or an exchange the ability to read your shielded transactions without the spending key, and it is the industry’s stock reply to every compliance question. Yap is saying the reply is technically true and practically empty. Firo’s own wallets are private by default, he says; his point is that transparent addresses do real work at the edges and that a product nobody can use protects nobody. Set that next to Desalle’s binary, fully encrypted or eventually identified, and you have the first real collision of the weekend, between two people who want the same thing and would rather complement each other than compete.

The clock says 10 July 2027

Every privacy project in that chair is building into a date. Article 79 of Regulation (EU) 2024/1624, the anti-money-laundering regulation, bars crypto service providers from keeping anonymous accounts and accounts in anonymity-enhancing coins from 10 July 2027, and recital 160 of the same text leaves providers of hardware and software wallets who have no access to or control over the assets outside the prohibition. The interviews sort themselves by which side of that recital the guest sits on. Yap’s keynote the next morning is about liquidity, the least romantic problem in his corner of the market.

how censorship-resistant are we if privacy coins lose their centralized exchange listings

Reuben Yap, co-founder, Firo

The venues privacy coins have migrated to need professional market makers, and those are regulated firms with exchange relationships to protect, so a decentralised front end on a centralised liquidity source inherits that source’s politics; his prescription is atomic swaps, the unglamorous option. Chhay Lin Lim sits on the other side of the recital, and he chose to. He founded Monflo, an Apeldoorn company whose IBAN account turns the euros you send it into a euro stablecoin, and he calls himself a hardcore crypto anarchist. He also sat in front of the AFM last year and received a MiCA licence on 4 December 2025 for custody, order execution and transfer services, according to ESMA’s interim register. I have put the surveillance state’s standard line, I need to watch you to keep you safe, to Ford and to Aaron Day earlier in the day. Lim calls it nonsense, twice, and then explains.

I don’t need protection from the state as much as they say that they give me protection. I think in a lot of ways they’re actually hurting me

Chhay Lin Lim, Founder, Monflo

The hurt he means is the cost of getting to the licence, and the licence is his strategy rather than his surrender. His account of the AFM meeting is the part I would have paid to watch.

So what I did is stop seeing us as always the adversary of the regulators, instead of finding common ground. In the end, we all want to protect the consumer. And I really believe the regulators are here to protect the consumer, even though I disagree with a lot of things they do, of course.

Chhay Lin Lim, Founder, Monflo

That of course is the moment he stops selling. A founder pitching privacy to a privacy conference has every incentive to play the rebel, and he chooses to say on camera that the people who licensed him are doing their job. The concrete mechanism is data minimisation: Monflo confirms who you are through your own bank, using iDIN, the identity service the Dutch banks run together, so the company never holds a copy of your passport. Ask what he wants to build next and he does not name a token.

On the short term, it’s compliant privacy. I think it’s doable, indeed. I expect that within the next two years that we can fully implement it. But it’s not the end goal.

Chhay Lin Lim, Founder, Monflo

Two years from this week is September 2028, and 10 July 2027 falls inside it, so whatever compliant privacy turns out to mean at Monflo it has to run under a licence after that date, which is Strobl’s anonymity-set argument seen from the licensed side. The organiser disagrees with the premise, and says so at the end of day one.

The red tape that MiCA added drowned this industry and has killed a lot of the innovation and projects that we should on the opposite support to thrive.

Eléonore Blanc, Founder, CryptoCanal

Lim built his company on the licence Blanc says drowned the industry, and both of them are in the same building by choice. Mick Peters-Sengers gives the clock a Dutch address. He founded and runs Superteam Netherlands, the Dutch chapter of the Solana talent network, twelve months old and started in a bear-market/" data-term-title="Bear Market" role="button" tabindex="0">bear market, and when I ask what the government could do for crypto he answers with what his friends think he does, which is sell courses from a villa in Thailand. It gets the biggest laugh of the day and it is the most serious thing he says, because the stereotype travels well past the regulators, to the civil servant who will one day read a consultation response from someone with a Solana address in the signature.

Similar to the divide between Web 2 and Web 3, I think there’s also kind of like an information asymmetry from the government and our industry.

Mick Peters-Sengers, Founder and Lead, Superteam Netherlands

His fix is a council of local experts to talk to the Tweede Kamer’s standing committee for Digital Affairs, and, if the interest holds, a workshop in the House itself; there is some interest, he says, and he hedges the size of it in the same breath. Then I ask what is missing for adoption at home in the next six to nine months, the question a community lead is supposed to answer with the thing he provides, and he turns the opening down.

I think it’s bigger than us, if I’m very honest. I think it’s bigger than the Netherlands.

Mick Peters-Sengers, Founder and Lead, Superteam Netherlands

The pace is set in Brussels and Washington. On Saturday the chairman of the very committee he wants to reach will sit in the same chair and tell me, unprompted, why that is.

The hardware and the homework

Bastien Taquet co-founded Satochip, the Belgian company behind a smartcard wallet that costs 25 euros and has neither a battery nor a screen, and he answers the credibility question by telling me I do not have to buy one from him.

if you want to be completely anonymous, completely clean when dealing with the purchase of your devices, you can do that. You buy a blank Java card online, you don’t have to do a KYC, you can buy even in cash, and then you can load the code yourself, because everything we are doing is open source.

Bastien Taquet, co-founder, Satochip

Recital 160 leaves hardware wallet makers outside the ban, and a card bought blank and loaded at home sits even further from it. His design argument is that everything you add weakens the device, so the card ships without a battery or a screen, and you read the destination address on the phone or laptop instead, with an optional second-factor app as Satochip’s answer. The concession is what I remember.

people that just want to interact with cryptocurrencies from time to time, exchange might be a solution, even if I don’t recommend it

Bastien Taquet, co-founder, Satochip

A hardware wallet co-founder telling a camera that some of his potential customers should not bother is the moment he stops selling, and he closes with homework rather than a product: learn how Bitcoin works, learn how the technology works. Sam, co-founder of AZTEQ Metaverse, a small Dutch team building a browser-based 3D world with its own game engine and its own coin, gives the homework a date when I ask why a metaverse builder spends Cypherpunk Week at a privacy conference.

April was like a massacre on hacks for the whole crypto community, but also take a look at Coldcard, right? Entropy is an important thing.

Sam, co-founder, AZTEQ Metaverse

April 2026 was the most-hacked month DefiLlama has counted, at about 630 million dollars across roughly thirty incidents. The Coldcard reference is a separate event: from 30 July, attackers drained wallets whose seeds had been generated with too little randomness, Coinkite, the maker, confirmed a firmware flaw behind the weak seeds, and TRM Labs puts the losses near 116 million dollars. The education that would have caught it is the part no vendor can ship in firmware. On Saturday Olaf van Wijk will tell me why ten years of that lesson has not moved the median user.

Builders who arrived with AI

James Walford wrote his first line of code in 2023. He is one half of Inferenco, a two-person team shipping a desktop wallet with its own browser on Cedra Network, the app AZTEQ loads its world into, and he says it without a flicker of apology.

I only started coding in 2023 when AI arrived

James Walford, Co-founder, Inferenco

I wouldn’t call myself a vibe coder because that’s like I type in and have an idea and you let the AI do it.

James Walford, Co-founder, Inferenco

The typing goes to the model and the energy it saves goes into deciding what the product should be, which he argues is the scarce part. The proof is a poker game. Its first version stored the cards on chain, where anyone could read them, and he went looking for the tool that closes that leak.

So I researched into whether zero-knowledge proofs could help, and yes, they can. It was quite an exercise, because the poker game goes to nearly max gas execution to run. But yeah, I got it working in the end.

James Walford, Co-founder, Inferenco

He found the hole in his own game and came back with the technique the cypherpunks in the next room would have prescribed. Sam builds on the wallet Walford writes, and the two have a weekly call. His version of the builder’s discipline is a sentence founders are coached never to say on camera.

as a project, we do overpromise sometimes, because you have to be ambitious. If you’re reaching for the stars, right, you’re not going to build a rocket and everything will go perfect on the first launch. No, you’re going to have crash and burns. You’re going to have to face the music.

Sam, co-founder, AZTEQ Metaverse

A founder who says that on camera has told you how to read his roadmap: as ambition, stated by someone who knows the difference. On Saturday the attacker’s side gets its arithmetic. Anirudh Singh Chohan comes off the stage with his backpack still in his hand. He is Head of Marketing at the Safe Foundation, the non-profit behind the Safe smart accounts where a great deal of DAO and treasury self-custody on EVM chains lives, and he has just spent his stage time on what he calls offensive and orchestrated AI: one or a few people with a bit of compute and uncensored open source models can now assemble an attack that used to take a crew, and defence budgets were sized for the crew.

Right now the code breakers seem to be ahead. And hey, we need hardening. We need defensive protocols to be built to be able to defend self-custody.

Anirudh Singh Chohan, Head of Marketing, Safe Foundation

His antidote is the one thing a model cannot argue with, cryptographic primitives and distributed consensus with economic accountability attached, packaged as SafeNet, a defence layer for multisigs with an open market of transaction checkers he calls sentinels. The same models that make attacks cheap make transaction analysis cheap, and paying for it produces a supply of it. Aaron Day’s use for the same tool is the strangest of the weekend and the most concrete. He runs the Daylight Freedom Foundation, and three days before we speak a federal judge ordered the state of New Hampshire to put him on the Senate ballot; he sued the state, argued the case himself, and says he built it with AI.

But you can use AI to win in court. You can actually use AI to kind of gum up the legal system.

Aaron Day, CEO, Daylight Freedom Foundation

They don’t refuse to fight back. They can’t afford to fight back.

Aaron Day, CEO, Daylight Freedom Foundation

Any rule that assumes a challenge rate near zero, because litigation is priced out of reach, has just lost its assumption. He says the word for the goal is obstruct, and he knows a hundred people filing a hundred suits cuts both ways.

Friday ends with the organiser

At the end of day one I sit down with the woman who built the building. Eléonore Blanc founded CryptoCanal in Amsterdam in 2019, ran three editions of ETHDam, and this year took the ticker out of the event’s name because, she tells me, a ticker sets a tone. Cryptofocus is a media partner of Common S3nse, which buys access and two team tickets, and the questions are mine. The partner list runs to six names, all of them privacy or self-custody. I put the word niche to her expecting a fight; she agrees, and then says something I have not heard from anyone who runs conferences for a living.

But objectively, it is small, and it’s also intentional that it’s small. Because if I grow, and if we have something with thousands of people, I will have to take money from sponsors that I don’t want to have. There’s a money angle here. If I, as an event organizer, if I start renting a venue for 10,000 people, I need to start accepting money from actors that I don’t want to promote.

Eléonore Blanc, Founder, CryptoCanal

A ticket costs 130 euros, students pay 15 and accepted hackers pay nothing, and the room is small because the sponsor list is short by design. Then I ask how crypto gets its ethos back, and she does not reach for a slide.

I’m not sure we can.

Eléonore Blanc, Founder, CryptoCanal

We’re still the cypherpunks of crypto. We’re a fringe minority in this industry.

Eléonore Blanc, Founder, CryptoCanal

Her Dutch example is where the organiser’s meaning of the sentence comes from. When I ask whether people will keep wiring their lives into AI services and stop caring, she says they probably will, and then explains why the data worries her.

It’s because we had great data. One, the Netherlands cooperated, and two, we just had a census done. So they knew exactly where everyone was living, who was there, their name, their religion, and they could just knock on their door, not in the polite way, and take them away. I don’t want history to repeat, but it echoes, right?

Eléonore Blanc, Founder, CryptoCanal

The mechanism she describes is documented: the Netherlands kept an unusually complete population registry, a decree of January 1941 required every Jewish resident to register, and the Anne Frank House puts the share of the country’s roughly 140,000 Jews who were murdered at about three quarters, the highest in Western Europe. That is the oldest meaning of the sentence in the building. A complete record is only as safe as whoever holds it next, and it was made in this city. Her fix for the AI version is self-custody one layer up: she hopes people learn to self-host their models.

Saturday: secure, and still unsafe

Saturday is hackathon day. Submissions closed at nine in the morning, judging is in person and the top ten present at three. When I tell Chohan that self-custody is a hard sell in a year when custodians are regulated, insured and easy, he turns the premise around.

It’s also true that self-custody has never been more valuable, with such geopolitical unrest in the world, self-custody actually matters a lot more.

Anirudh Singh Chohan, Head of Marketing, Safe Foundation

The reasons to hold your own keys are getting stronger at the same time as the tooling aimed at those keys is getting cheaper. Olaf van Wijk, the founder of Nihilium, answers the other half of that sentence, and he starts by agreeing with the people this room usually argues with. I put to him the complaint I get most from readers, that a bank protects far more money than my wallet holds with a password and a code on a phone, and I expect a defence of the industry.

The critics are correct. You instruct the bank to do something on your behalf. It’s their system, it’s their database, it’s their ledger. And of course, crypto, the ledger is public, so now you can trust one party to change the ledger, so that’s you. So the entire responsibility that the bank bears is now in the hands of the key holder.

Olaf van Wijk, Founder, Nihilium

A bank’s password reset works because the bank operates the system of record and can rewrite your row in it. Crypto deleted that role on purpose, and everything the bank used to absorb landed on one person. He has spent almost six years on the screen where that responsibility arrives, the twelve or twenty-four words and the sentence telling you that if you lose them nobody on earth can help, and his verdict on the industry’s answer lands on people like me.

We’ve run the experiment for over 10 years now. There’s a lot of education, there’s a lot of great content that teaches people how to be responsible, but 90% of the people will just not do it, and unfortunately that’s the truth. I would have liked to see that differently.

Olaf van Wijk, Founder, Nihilium

I run a crypto publication, and ten years of never-share-your-seed-phrase graphics have barely moved the median user. His conclusion is that education was asked to do a job that belongs to the product, and his product is a path to a new seed phrase you do not know yet, with no party in the middle ever holding the funds. The moment you export the secret to a third party, he says, you lose control, and that is the test for every social-recovery and guardian scheme pitched in Amsterdam this week: ask where the secret sits while the check runs. Taquet’s card, Sam’s entropy and van Wijk’s path are one conversation held across two days, and van Wijk names the gap the other two were circling.

Crypto has the idea that it’s very secure but feels very unsafe. And it is that feeling.

Olaf van Wijk, Founder, Nihilium

Cryptography does not care how anyone feels, and adoption cares about little else; the thing standing between crypto and a normal person is a screen with twelve words on it and a threat underneath.

The politicians make the builders’ argument

I had the political guests down as a side track of the programme, and by Saturday afternoon I know they are the spine of it, because the argument every builder in the chair makes about wallets and ledgers is the argument the politicians make about states. Aaron Day, who chaired the Free State Project and wrote a book against central bank digital currencies, calls the thing he is fighting technocracy. His answer to it is exit, and then he tells me how far his own exit has got.

So, for instance, I don’t use a personal bank account. I haven’t since 2019, and I’ve moved exclusively into privacy coins and, to a certain degree, gold and silver.

Aaron Day, CEO, Daylight Freedom Foundation

But that’s not moving rapidly. The number of people that are kind of moving in that direction is dwarfed by the general growth of technocracy.

Aaron Day, CEO, Daylight Freedom Foundation

A man whose life is the exit telling a room full of people building exits that the exit is losing on the numbers is the most honest minute of Friday, and it explains why the middle of his plan is obstruction rather than migration. He wears a Zano shirt through the interview and does not hide what he holds. Vit Jedlicka wants a border rather than a licence. He is the president of Liberland, the seven square kilometres of Danube floodplain he and a small group claimed on 13 April 2015 in a pocket neither Croatia nor Serbia claims, and he says 800,000 people have applied to join him. I ask how you get other countries to accept you, and he reaches for a treaty.

People believe that in order to be country you have to be recognized. Montevideo criteria is very specific about the fact that the country doesn’t need recognition by other countries to be country. It only needs to follow certain criteria.

Vit Jedlicka, President, Free Republic of Liberland

The Montevideo Convention of 1933 lists four qualifications for a state, a permanent population, a defined territory, a government and the capacity to enter into relations with other states, and says in Article 3 that a state’s political existence is independent of recognition by other states. Croatia, he tells me, has officially called Liberland a parastate, and he takes the word as a compliment. Access took most of a decade; Croatia opened the crossing on 6 August 2023. What makes the interview worth a crypto reader’s time is where the government is going to run, because the machinery of the state is becoming a DAO.

The smart contract, which is in Solidity, ready to be deployed on the top of Ethereum, is ready. It’s being audited right now. We found great partners for audit right on this conference.

Vit Jedlicka, President, Free Republic of Liberland

Liberland ran its own chain for years, and the person who talked him onto Ethereum was Justin Sun, its first elected prime minister; the reason Jedlicka gives is to avoid bridges, which is the sentence a security engineer underlines, because bridges have been the most reliably drained infrastructure in this industry. Ralf Dekker walks in from the other direction. He is a sitting member of the Tweede Kamer, chairs its standing committee for Digital Affairs, and currently leads the Forum voor Democratie group in the House; before politics he spent more than thirty years at Rabobank. He is the only MP on the programme, and the committee he chairs is the one Peters-Sengers wants to reach with his council. I ask why crypto gets so little trust in The Hague, and he starts with his own generation of politicians, who he says have little attachment to the subject.

They are proud that they can use a computer, but that’s about it.

Ralf Dekker, interim parliamentary party leader, Forum voor Democratie

That is Peters-Sengers’s information asymmetry described from inside the building, by the man who chairs the room. Then he explains the mistrust, and it has nothing to do with technology.

In the Netherlands, not paying your taxes is being seen as worse than murder.

Ralf Dekker, interim parliamentary party leader, Forum voor Democratie

When crypto reads as the vehicle for that sin, anyone standing next to it inherits the guilt, and an official who starts from laundering is deciding how tightly to hold something already read as suspect. He is sympathetic to the Wi-Fi password, points at box 3 and inheritance tax, and then says the most cypherpunk thing anyone says in two days, with a parliamentary pass in his pocket.

The freer the flow of information, the easier it is to spy on us and to keep us under control, also in the financial sector.

Ralf Dekker, interim parliamentary party leader, Forum voor Democratie

That is the fourth meaning of the sentence, and it is the state’s own: privacy is security against the tools the state now holds, said by someone who helps hold them. Set it next to the council Peters-Sengers is assembling and the workshop he wants in the Tweede Kamer, and the two Dutch guests have described the same door from both sides without meeting in the chair. Dekker’s account of where the decisions go is the answer to Peters-Sengers’s bigger than us: we are all followers today, he tells me, because the Netherlands cannot diverge from France or Germany, so decision-making gets pushed up to the EU, and the pattern that follows is to comply with the new rules, criticise them afterwards, and follow them anyway. The anti-money-laundering package, MiCA and the digital euro were all written in Brussels, and a Dutch committee gets an opinion. That is where the clock lands: 10 July 2027 was set at a table this committee does not sit at. On money itself, after three decades inside a bank, he calls fiat completely based on trust and nothing else, favours experimenting with bitcoin and stablecoins as a second set of rails beside the SWIFT-based system, and sees no short-term replacement. His last ask is aimed at the room, and it is the opposite of Day’s exit.

Wait a minute, you’re Dutch, you’re part of Dutch country and the Dutch community. Why not set something up in the Netherlands that is lasting, as the old industrialists did?

Ralf Dekker, interim parliamentary party leader, Forum voor Democratie

Day left the banks in 2019 and calls it exit. Jedlicka left the map altogether and drew a new one. Dekker asks the founders in the room to stay, and he is the one with the committee. What a Dutch reader takes home from two days in De Hallen is shorter than the programme. The date is 10 July 2027, and it was set in Brussels. The people building for it are, by their own account, a fringe minority who keep their conference small on purpose, and the licensed founder among them gives compliant privacy two years. The committee that will hold the Dutch opinion is chaired by a man who says his colleagues are proud they can use a computer, and a Solana chapter is trying to get a workshop into his building. The hackathon’s top ten present at three o’clock, and the argument does not adjourn.

Read the sixteen interviews

Friday, 4 September 2026, in the order they sat down:

• Casey Ford, Nym
• Mick Peters-Sengers, Superteam Netherlands
• Reuben Yap, Firo
• Aaron Day, Daylight Freedom Foundation
• Bastien Taquet, Satochip
• Maxime Desalle, Winklevoss Capital
• Sebastien Guillemot, Midnight Foundation
• Chhay Lin Lim, Monflo
• Eléonore Blanc, CryptoCanal
• Sam, AZTEQ Metaverse
• James Walford, Inferenco
• Martin Strobl, Researcher, Logos

Saturday, 5 September 2026:

• Anirudh Singh Chohan, Safe Foundation
• Vit Jedlicka, Liberland
• Olaf van Wijk, Nihilium
• Ralf Dekker, Forum voor Democratie

Both day hubs refresh themselves as the last pieces go live: day one and day two.

Recorded at Common S3nse 2026, De Hallen Studio’s, Amsterdam, on 4 and 5 September 2026, during Cypherpunk Week. Quotes are verbatim from the recordings with filler removed. Cryptofocus is a media partner of Common S3nse. Nothing here is financial advice.