This is my first post in a while due to commitments. I am writing with exciting updates regarding our expanding technical operations in Switzerland.

As a Swiss foundation, DFINITY has long had business and back-office operations in Switzerland, but until recently research and development work on the ground has mainly involved collaborations with academic institutions. I am now proud and happy to announce that we have established a large new dedicated DFINITY research center in Zurich, Switzerland, with space for up to 50 additional DFINITY team members, to augment our longstanding flagship research center in Palo Alto, California, and globally distributed team. I’m also incredibly pleased to announce the center has been bootstrapped by an initial team of truly outstanding and world-class researchers and engineers, reflecting our vision, goals and strategy.

Our new Zurich center is led by Dr. Jan Camenisch, an IEEE Fellow and multi-award winning research scientist famous in the fields of cryptography and privacy. Jan has published over 100 widely-cited scientific articles and created more than 70 U.S. patents, and joins DFINITY from IBM Research, where he held the position of Principal Research Staff Member and led the Privacy & Cryptography group. Jan is joined by other new team members who are also renowned leaders in their fields, including Maria Dubovitskaya, Gregory Neven, Manu Drijvers, David Derler, Andrea Cerulli, and Yulin Liu — about whose work we will provide more details in due course. They will continue to work closely with our broader teams in Palo Alto and abroad on Internet Computer implementation.

In addition to housing the growing team of individuals based in Zurich, the Zurich research center shall provide a physical space for our wider team in Europe to gather, collaborate and share expertise and knowledge surrounding DFINITY’s production. It is also in close proximity to world-renowned academic institutions such as ETH Zurich and École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), and to the European research and development operations of many technology giants, including Google and IBM. Our new center now provides one of the most desirable places in Europe to work on a public decentralized network.

We are now seeking to fill additional roles in Zurich and Europe through research and software engineering to operations. If you are interested in working for one of the world’s most potentially impactful technology ventures, please get in touch.

The Zurich research center ramps up ongoing efforts by DFINITY, which are guided by three core principles:

(1) The pursuit of a clear vision that explains how the Internet Computer will generate transformative value by hosting the world’s next generation of software and internet services in the role of a public Cloud 3.0.

(2) The relentless application of advanced research and engineering to overcome technical challenges in domains such as cryptography, blockchain protocols, peer-to-peer networking, virtual machines, hypervisors and language design, so that DFINITY technology continues to unlock hitherto unimagined levels of decentralization, speed, scale, efficiency, security, privacy, availability and usability.

(3) The continuous build-out of a global not-for-profit organization (the DFINITY Foundation), often referred to as a “NASA for decentralization”, that can appropriately support the Internet Computer network as a public resource of critical importance and drive forwards timely advancements in the underlying science.

As always, I extend my thanks to everyone supporting the project, and look forward to sharing more updates on our continuing organizational build-out soon!