Infrastructure, built by people.

I am a Belgian digital entrepreneur. I founded Singulr because one question had haunted me for years, and one specific moment convinced me it was time to act.

The question: why do we so easily surrender control of our data — the most sensitive, the most strategic — to foreign players, without even asking ourselves about the consequences?

The moment: the 2018 order of thirty-four F-35s for around four billion euros. An excellent aircraft, chosen by many allies — that is not the issue. What these jets also carry is a centralised logistics and software system (ALIS, now ODIN) through which maintenance, updates and mission data flow, and which the operating country does not fully control. No accusation, no suspicion: it is simply the logic of any critical infrastructure entrusted to a third party. Specialists call it vendor lock-in. We had absorbed that dependency — lasting, and largely invisible — without ever quite naming it.

What struck me was not the aircraft. It was that no one seemed to see it as a problem. We had normalised dependency.

And this dependency does not concern armies alone. It concerns our hospitals, whose patient records transit through American servers subject to the CLOUD Act. Our municipalities, whose source code is hosted on GitHub, owned by Microsoft. Our companies, whose business tools send their data to datacenters in Virginia or Oregon. The 2018 CLOUD Act allows American authorities to access this data, wherever it is stored in the world, as soon as an American company is its manager. FISA 702 goes even further, authorising surveillance of foreign communications without an individual warrant. This is not a conspiracy theory. These are laws in force, publicly adopted, that our European partners and we ourselves have ignored for far too long.

The answer is not isolationism. The United States remains an ally, GitHub a formidable tool, Amazon Web Services a remarkable infrastructure. But total dependence on a single geopolitical ecosystem is a vulnerability that history has taught us to recognise — too often after the fact.

Countries have begun to act. France with code.gouv.fr. The Netherlands with code.overheid.nl, soft-launched (pilot phase) on 24 April 2026, which hosts the source code of its public administrations on a sovereign forge based on Forgejo. These are weak signals announcing a groundswell.

I founded Singulr so that Belgium would not be absent from this movement. Not as an ideological declaration. As a concrete, operational infrastructure, accessible today: a sovereign Git forge, operated from Belgium under Belgian law, serving a European digital commons, operated by a non-profit association. Our data belongs to us. Our code belongs to us. Becoming sovereign again starts with simple decisions — provided we make them.