Trust Square in Zurich

Trust Square is a commercial workspace operator with an event program attached, and the legal entity behind it is Trust Square Ecosystem AG, a Swiss stock corporation with a board of directors. It earns its money from office space, meeting rooms and events, which is the model Netzwoche described when it reported the opening as a privately held company that rents out office space and sells advisory services.

Daniel Gasteiger and Marc Degen co-founded it. Greater Zurich Area names Marc Degen as co-founder and board member, and Daniel Gasteiger was its president from the start, a former chief of staff to UBS chairman Axel Weber who left banking to work on blockchain in Zurich.

Trust Square has three Swiss addresses today: Rennweg 57 in Zurich, Gotthardstrasse 26 and Landis + Gyr-Strasse 1 in Zug, and Churerstrasse 56 in Pfäffikon SZ. The Zug addresses put it inside Crypto Valley, the Swiss crypto and blockchain ecosystem that grew up around Zug.

It has moved twice. It opened in April 2018 on Bahnhofstrasse, directly opposite the Swiss National Bank, on 2,300 square meters over three floors with about 200 workstations, and Netzwoche reported almost every desk let before the doors opened (in German). By the fourth quarter of 2018 it had grown past 3,000 square meters and more than 300 workstations, which is how Greater Zurich Area described the expansion. In January 2020 it moved to Paradeplatz, and the Rennweg address is where it sits now. Sources from the early years give different street numbers for the Bahnhofstrasse building, so the street and the national bank across from it are the reliable part.

Trust Square rents premium coworking, meeting and event space, and the workspace page lists a virtual office with the Rennweg 57 company address and optional mail handling, a flexible desk with weekday access, a fixed desk with access around the clock, and private offices and team rooms for individuals and teams.

Membership runs separately from the desk and comes in two kinds, individual and corporate, each with three levels. Trust Square addresses it to startups, corporate partners, investors and ecosystem builders, and the way in is a contact form stating what you are after, after which its team replies in person. There is no public sign-up button and no self-service checkout.

Three event formats carry the Trust Square name, and each one is built around a different group size. Trust Forum is the twice-yearly flagship, capped at 250 people, with keynotes, Oxford-style debates and fireside dinners and no panels or pitches. Trust Circle is invite-only and smaller, roughly 20 to 100 participants, with question circles, debate duos, hot-seat sessions and themed dinners.

Trust Hive is the smallest and the least planned: 5 to 20 people brought together around an occasion, a result or a question that will not wait. Trust Square names tech founders, enterprises, governments and policymakers, and investors among the people who come, and the subjects of the formats run from financial systems and privacy to AI and Web3.

Trust Square started on one subject and widened to four. The first tenants worked on blockchain, and the insurance consortium B3i alone took around 50 workstations in the early Bahnhofstrasse years. Netzwoche reported the widening in 2019 (in German): cybersecurity first, then artificial intelligence and the internet of things, with a partnership with the Mindfire Foundation on AI.

That mix is close to what banks and insurers now budget for. A payments team evaluating instant settlement, a risk team writing model documentation and a treasury desk looking at tokenized funds all sit in the same subject area, and Trust Square rents them space in the same building. The Swiss regulatory frame around that work is on the Crypto Valley page, and the Zurich finance city context is on fintech in Zurich.

Trust Square names its stakeholders as the Onchain Foundation, The Hashgraph Association and Inacta Ventures, and lists the Swiss Blockchain Federation, Women in Web3 Switzerland and Crypto Oasis among its partners.

Nine academic institutions appear on the same list: ETH Zurich, the University of Zurich, the universities of Basel, Lucerne and St. Gallen, HSLU, ZHAW, OST and the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management. The Frankfurt School entry is the one German link in the list, and it is also the venue of conferences Finance Loop works with.

Zurich is where the Swiss banks, the Swiss National Bank, SIX and the insurers sit, which is why a house for emerging finance technology opposite the national bank made sense in 2018. Carmen Walker Späh, who heads the canton of Zurich's department for economic affairs, backed the project publicly, and the canton supported the first Bahnhofstrasse lease as interim space.

Switzerland has two centers for this work, not one. Zug and the Crypto Valley around it hold the token issuers, the foundations and the crypto banks, and Zurich holds the banks, the insurers and the research. Trust Square has addresses in both, which is the practical answer to why its Zug sites exist. Other European cities run their own version of the same thing, and the crypto hubs in Europe page sets them side by side.

Trust Square rents workspace and runs events for people working on emerging technology in and around finance. The workspace side covers virtual offices, flexible and fixed desks, private offices and meeting and event rooms at three Swiss addresses. The event side covers the Trust Forum, Trust Circle and Trust Hive formats, plus meetups that other organizations co-host in its rooms. Membership, in an individual or a corporate form, is the way into the network around it.

Trust Square's Zurich address is Rennweg 57, 8001 Zurich, in the banking quarter between Bahnhofstrasse and Paradeplatz. Searches for "trust square bahnhofstrasse" point at the earlier address, which Trust Square left in January 2020. Its two other Swiss sites are in Zug, at Gotthardstrasse 26 and Landis + Gyr-Strasse 1, and in Pfäffikon SZ at Churerstrasse 56.

You write to Trust Square through the contact form on its website, say whether you want an individual or a corporate membership and what you are interested in, and its team answers personally. Individual membership has three levels and corporate membership has three levels. Trust Square does not publish a membership application form or an online sign-up, so the conversation decides the level.

No. Crypto Valley is the name for the Swiss crypto and blockchain ecosystem that grew around Zug, with hundreds of companies, foundations and service firms in it. Trust Square is one company among the Swiss houses doing this work, with its own addresses in Zurich, Zug and Pfäffikon SZ. When it opened, Trust Square set itself apart from Zug by working on blockchain use outside digital currencies, and it described its Zurich house as an addition to what other Swiss regions had already built. The Crypto Valley page covers the ecosystem itself.