CyberSec Europe 2026: Capsyra & Ewigbyte, Two European Startups Build the Storage Architecture That Outlasts Its Creators

At CyberSec Europe 2026, Europe’s largest cybersecurity event, Belgian startup Capsyra and German deep-tech company Ewigbyte GmbH announced the formal establishment of a strategic technology partnership — and demonstrated, live on the exhibition floor, what that partnership produces: data written into glass that no cyberattack can encrypt, no ransomware can delete, and no company failure can erase.The announcement coincides with Capsyra’s nomination for the Best Cybersecurity Innovation Europe Award at CyberSec Europe 2026, one of the most prestigious recognitions in the European cybersecurity landscape. Capsyra pitched before the professional jury on the Main Stage on May 20 and was announced the following day as the third-place winner overall — the only startup among the award recipients.

The problem neither company could solve alone
Every institution managing data faces two questions that conventional storage architectures cannot simultaneously answer. Is the data still there? And is it still true — unaltered, provably intact, and accessible regardless of what has happened in the intervening years to the vendor, the platform, or the encryption standard?

Until now, these questions have been answered separately, imperfectly, or not at all.

Cloud storage alone answers neither. It promises availability, not integrity — and its continuity depends entirely on the vendor’s survival and pricing decisions. Tape and optical disc answer the first question partially, but offer no cryptographic proof of integrity over time, and no mechanism for data to survive the collapse of the custodian organization. Post-quantum encryption transitions threaten to render today’s encrypted archives unreadable within a decade.

Capsyra and Ewigbyte address each dimension of this problem from opposite ends — and together, they close the gap entirely.

Capsyra: the system that survives itself
Capsyra, founded in 2025 and headquartered in Ieper, Belgium, has built a data governance and continuity layer designed around one radical promise: archived data must be able to outlive the company that archived it.

Its OmniCapsule architecture produces cryptographically sealed, independently verifiable data objects anchored in hybrid blockchain verification and WORM-compliant distributed storage. Each capsule is portable, platform-independent, and self-evidencing — its integrity can be verified without contacting Capsyra, without trusting any single cloud provider, and without requiring any ongoing subscription to remain valid.

The financial model is equally unconventional. Rather than monthly subscriptions, Capsyra charges a single upfront fee that funds the data’s entire lifecycle — including future re-encryption as post-quantum standards evolve. If Capsyra ceased to exist tomorrow, every archive it had created would remain intact, provable, and retrievable. The system is designed as a dead man’s switch: its default outcome, in the absence of any action, is preservation — not loss.

Ewigbyte: writing data into matter
Ewigbyte GmbH, based in Pöcking, Germany, is developing a photonic glass storage infrastructure service that operates on a different principle altogether: physical permanence. Using femtosecond laser technology and a DMD mirror device, Ewigbyte ablates data directly into glass at the nanoscale. The result is a storage medium whose properties are determined not by software or operational decisions, but by the physics of glass itself.

Glass does not degrade. It does not require power to keep the data. It cannot be remotely wiped, encrypted by ransomware, or exfiltrated through a network connection. It is naturally air-gapped. Data written into glass today is readable with appropriate instruments in a thousand years — requiring no active maintenance, no vendor relationship, and no energy expenditure after the moment of writing.

At the CyberSec Europe stand, visitors can see this for themselves. Ewigbyte has produced glass samples encoding Capsyra’s logo and textual data, readable through a portable microscope and a standard QR code reader. The demonstration requires no specialist equipment and no explanation: the data is there, in the glass, visible and retrievable on demand.

This is not archival storage. It is the terminal layer of the data lifecycle — the end point from which nothing can be deleted.

The combined proposition: infrastructure designed to outlast its creators
When Capsyra’s governance layer operates over Ewigbyte’s photonic glass storage infrastructure, the resulting system has properties that no existing infrastructure can replicate.

The data is physically indestructible — fixed into matter, immune to cyberattack, power failure, and organizational collapse. Its integrity is cryptographically self-evidencing — the physical structure of the glass demonstrates that nothing has changed, while the OmniCapsule proof chain provides independent verifiability at any future point. The archive does not depend on the continued existence of either company: both the medium and the governance layer are designed to function without their creators.

And the system is energy-independent: once written, the glass archive consumes no power and requires no active maintenance for its physical survival.

Beginning in early 2027, selected customers will be able to provision governance-grade photonic glass storage directly through Capsyra’s platform interface, enabling the first operational deployments of the combined architecture beyond demonstration environments. Through the integration, organizations will be able to archive data into Ewigbyte’s photonic glass storage layer while retaining the full benefits of Capsyra’s cryptographic governance, continuity, and verification framework — without introducing additional operational complexity on the customer side.

The initial rollout will focus on institutions and organizations with long-term data obligations, including research, cultural heritage, regulated industry, and critical infrastructure sectors.

“This is infrastructure built not for the technology cycles of today,” said Dr. Ina von Haeften, co-founder and head, operations, Ewigbyte, “but for the institutions that will still exist long after those cycles have passed. We are not selling storage. We are building the layer of permanence that Europe’s data infrastructure has been missing — and the partnership with Capsyra is what makes it complete. Together, we can guarantee something no single company can: that what is written today will still be there, and still be true, when it is needed most.”

“Data has always been treated as something you manage,” said Ruben Tacq, CEO and CTO, Capsyra. “We believe it should be treated as something you protect — with the same seriousness that institutions protect their most irreplaceable physical assets. The combination of Capsyra’s continuity architecture and Ewigbyte’s photonic glass storage infrastructure is the first system that actually delivers on that promise. Not because we trust each other to keep our companies alive, but because we have built something that does not require that trust.”

A European answer to a global infrastructure problem
The partnership is well-timed. NIS2 enforcement across EU member states is now underway, requiring operators of essential services to demonstrate data integrity and resilience in ways that current storage architectures cannot satisfy. The Cyber Resilience Act, entering into force progressively through 2027, mandates lifecycle-long auditability for digital products. Post-quantum cryptography transitions — accelerated by NIST’s finalization of the first post-quantum standards in 2025 — mean that organisations with long-term encrypted archives face a structural re-encryption challenge within the coming decade.

Both companies position themselves explicitly as European alternatives to hyperscaler dependency: sovereign by design, compliant by architecture, and built specifically for the institutions — national archives, cultural heritage bodies, healthcare systems, critical infrastructure operators, regulated industries — whose data carries obligations that extend across generations, not quarters.

The global data archiving market is estimated at approximately €21 billion and growing. The addressable market for long-term, governance-grade archival infrastructure in European regulated sectors — the beachhead both companies are targeting — represents a rapidly expanding segment driven not by discretionary IT spend, but by legal mandate.