The Common S3nse speaker page held 39 names when we last counted it on 11 August. On Wednesday it holds 56, and one of them sits in the Dutch House of Representatives. The conference opens at De Hallen in Amsterdam this Friday, its hackathon has 95 registered builders, and a day pass has appeared that did not exist three weeks ago.
| What you need to know |
|---|
| 1Common S3nse runs on Friday 4 and Saturday 5 September at De Hallen Studio's in Amsterdam-West. |
| 2We counted 56 entries on the speaker page on 2 September, against 39 on 11 August. The previous edition finished with 68. |
| 3The hackathon platform showed 95 registered builders on 2 September, with teams capped at five people and sign-up still open. |
| 4A one-day pass now costs 80 euro against 130 for both days, and five events left on the Cypherpunk Week calendar cost nothing at all. |
Cryptofocus is a media partner of Common S3nse. What that gets you: a reader discount code, and a preview built from the organiser’s own box office, speaker page and hackathon platform rather than from a press release. We are not paid per ticket sold.
What the Common S3nse speaker page says now
We went through the conference speaker page again on Wednesday and counted 56 entries, seventeen more than the 39 we listed three weeks ago. Two of them carry no role at all, which is normal for a room where a handle is often the only name anyone uses. The previous edition, still trading as ETHDam, closed at 68, so the roster is not finished.
A sitting MP on a cypherpunk stage
The entry that stands out is Ralf Dekker, listed as a member of parliament for Forum voor Democratie. His register entry in the Tweede Kamer confirms the seat: born in 1957, resident in Amsterdam, 625 days in the House. His written questions and motions have run to foreign policy, Ukraine and the tax gap between single-earner and dual-earner households. Nothing in that record is about cryptography, which is rather the point of putting a stage in a tram depot instead of keeping the argument inside a Discord server.
The party link is not new. CryptoCanal announced FvD leader Thierry Baudet for ETHDam III in March 2025, promising a political lens on the stage. This year it is a serving legislator rather than a party leader. Vit Jedlicka, president of the self-declared micronation Liberland, is on the list too, and hosts a separate gathering on Thursday evening.
For everything else on that page, from the hardware-wallet makers to the mixer developers who will be regulated very differently from them, see our walk-through of the line-up.
Ninety-five builders have signed up for the hackathon
The online build week started on Monday and runs until Saturday. On Wednesday the hackathon page on Taikai showed 95 registered participants, teams capped at five people, and registration still open. That is the number to watch on Saturday afternoon, because it sets how many projects reach the stage.
There are two doors. Teams starting from scratch build during the week, present on Saturday, and are the only ones eligible for partner bounties. Existing projects enter through a track the organisers call Otter Tank, show what they have already shipped on Friday, and get feedback instead of prize money. The three lanes are privacy, security and DeFi, described on the site as directions rather than boxes.
Acceptance carries full access to both conference days, the second stage and the partner booths, at no cost. For a technical reader put off by the ticket price, that is the cheaper way in, and it shuts when registration does.
What the room actually looks like once it fills is easier shown than described. The organiser’s own aftermovie from the May 2025 edition, filmed at Pakhuis de Zwijger before the move to De Hallen, runs just over three minutes.
A day pass appeared, and it costs 80 euro
One tier has been added since our first preview of the move into Cypherpunk Week. A day pass costs 80 euro and covers either Friday or Saturday, picked at checkout, with the same access to both stages and the booth area as the full ticket. That is the option for anyone who cannot give up a whole weekend.
The rest of the ladder has not moved. Both days cost 130 euro, students pay 15 euro against a student card at the door, 200 euro adds DashCon on Thursday, and a bundle of ten seats for a company or community costs 5000 euro. Our reader code CRYPTOFOCUS10 takes 10 percent off, which puts the full ticket at 117 euro.
The box office behind those buttons lists the same prices without VAT, and they reconcile to the cent: 107.44 euro plus 21 percent is 130.00, and the day pass at 66.11 euro plus VAT lands on 79.99. Every paid tier also carries a pay-with-crypto option, which for this particular audience is less a convenience than a house rule.
Five things left on the week’s calendar cost nothing
The conference sits inside Cypherpunk Week, which runs from 31 August to 6 September and has no central organiser. Reading the shared calendar the week publishes on Wednesday evening, nine things are still scheduled from Thursday onward. Five of them are free to attend.
Thursday and Friday
Thursday belongs to DashCon, in the same building, on digital cash and instant payments. Its box office charges 75 euro, or 200 bundled with the conference. The after party at CafƩ Bax costs nothing, and neither does an evening with Vit Jedlicka, which needed host approval and showed four places left when we read it on Wednesday. Floating Tech Talk asks 5 euro.
On Friday evening, three minutes from the main venue, Grego AI hosts Bugs & Beers at CafƩ Bax between six and eight, free after approval, with 25 people signed up. Its chief executive Justus Hanna is on the conference stage as well, and the invitation is candid about the economics: buy your own beer, the alpha is free. Anyone who followed the summer argument about where bitcoin bugs should be reported will recognise most of the guest list.
Saturday, and one thing that is not free
Saturday ends with a ninety-minute walking tour at half past six, sponsored by Zcash and guided in English. The hosts say they picked the route with Able Amsterdam so that wheelchairs and mobility devices can join. Their description traces the city’s privacy trade back four hundred years, through the false imprints that carried Spinoza and Locke past censors, the forged papers of the 1940s and the squats and phone phreaks of the 1980s. It finishes at a bar on the Utrechtsestraat where 34 people have already said they will be.
One listing on that calendar is easy to misread. The Zcash booth runs on both conference days, offering hands-on shielded-wallet setup with no appointment, but it sits inside the venue and reaching it needs a pass.
Roughly ten months after the doors close on Saturday, article 79 of the European anti-money-laundering regulation bars platforms from holding accounts that work with anonymising coins. Some of the people on that stage are exempt from it by name, and some are not. On Friday morning they are all in the same tram depot.
