Sovereignty gets a customer: why a Swiss metals platform is building on a national subnet

FinkaMetals is a Swiss company with an eight-person team building a marketplace for metals concentrates. In a joint video interview recorded at the DFINITY Swiss headquarters, CEO Carlos Francisco Fernandez appeared alongside Dennis Platzl, CEO of Swiss Subnet AG, and Moritz Fuller, a senior solutions engineer. The conversation is a sequel of sorts to this publication's earlier piece on the Internet Computer Protocol as a test of what sovereignty means in practice. What is new here is a customer, a commercial buyer explaining why nationally bounded, decentralised execution won the mandate over hyperscaler cloud.

What is FinkaMetals building?

FinkaMetals is building a marketplace for metals concentrates together with a delivery module, with go-live planned for the end of the year. The roadmap then extends to trade finance, a stablecoin, sustainability, and logistics modules. A central ambition is the tokenisation of contained metal, representing physical concentrate as on-chain instruments that can be priced, settled, and transferred. Fernandez placed the opportunity in context: the global concentrate market is around $700 billion, and copper alone on the London Metal Exchange in 2025 was valued at roughly $12 trillion. Platzl's summary of the status quo was blunt: the industry is "tremendously old school."

Why did jurisdiction decide the infrastructure choice?

The decisive factor was not technology but jurisdiction. Fernandez explained that the US CLOUD Act makes hyperscaler cloud untenable for Swiss-resident data, because it exposes data to extraterritorial US legal process. The Swiss Subnet offered a structural counter-offer: independent node operators in Switzerland and Liechtenstein, Tier III data centres, and no provider access to customer data. Platzl was candid about who the offer is not for, a British neobank, he noted, would not be the right fit, but for a Swiss platform whose value proposition depends on data staying under Swiss law, the alignment was direct. His framing: "if no backdoors is your go-to, then the Swiss subnet is the ideal solution."

What does Swiss execution mean in practice?

For FinkaMetals, Swiss execution means a dedicated virtualised cloud engine running only in Switzerland. The architecture also contemplates hybrid geometries, local bare-metal nodes in places like Africa and Singapore paired with the Swiss node, so that regional data can stay regional while settlement runs on the Swiss Subnet. Fuller credited ongoing developments in the DFINITY cloud engine as the technical substrate that makes this kind of nationally bounded deployment possible.

Where does the technology earn its place?

Fuller drew a distinction between settlement and execution. On most chains, he said, settlement happens on-chain but execution, the actual running of application logic, is 99.9% off-chain, which reintroduces the very trust assumptions blockchains are meant to remove. Storage costs reinforce the point: he cited a figure of roughly $15 million per gigabyte to store data on Ethereum. The Internet Computer Protocol's canister model, by contrast, runs computation on-chain. Fuller's analogy: it is "almost a decentralised Docker container that runs on a blockchain." That is where the technology earns its place, not as a settlement layer but as an execution environment that keeps logic and data inside the jurisdictional boundary.

What should a diligent buyer still verify?

Four items deserve scrutiny before treating the Swiss Subnet as a settled answer. First, governance: the Network Nervous System governs the protocol at the protocol level, and Swiss and Liechtenstein node operators do not by themselves answer the question of who can change the rules of a subnet. Second, the access claim: "no provider access to data" is a strong selling point, but a diligent buyer should ask for evidence, how keys are custodied, how nodes are isolated, and what the compelled-access posture is under Swiss and Liechtenstein law. Third, delivery: the platform is still in development, with go-live planned for the end of the year, so the architecture is a plan being executed rather than a system in production. Fourth, the figures: the market sizes, storage costs, and pipeline described in the interview are the participants' own numbers and have not been independently verified.

The signal for Europe

The clearest signal is that a commercial buyer chose nationally bounded, decentralised execution over hyperscaler cloud, and did so on jurisdictional grounds before technological ones. Platzl indicated that inbound demand is running ahead of the original plan. The Swiss Subnet is a national rather than a European experiment, but as a working template for how sovereign infrastructure is sold and verified, it is exactly the kind of case this publication has been watching for. Go-live at the end of the year will tell how much of the promise holds.

Editorial note: the interview was conducted as a joint video recording at the DFINITY Swiss headquarters. Quotations have been lightly edited for clarity.