Local people. Local judgement.

A seven-hundred-year-old idea.

Zürich's Zünfte were guilds of practitioners. Bakers, smiths, weavers, boatmen, tailors, masons, vintners. They organised their trades, certified their members, kept their standards, and — most importantly for us — resolved their own disputes. If a baker's loaf was short of weight, the baker's guild decided. If a boatman overcharged on the lake, the boatman's guild decided. The judges were the practitioners, and the practitioners were the judges.

The Zünfte are not a museum exhibit. Twenty-six of them still meet in Zürich today, in guildhalls that have stood for centuries on either side of the Limmat. Every April they walk through the city together for Sechseläuten — a procession in trade colours, on horseback, with bands — ending in the burning of the Böögg, a snowman whose head signals the length of the summer to come. The festival is a piece of theatre. The institution behind it is not.

Why the tradition still fits.

A bike is not bread. The mechanism is older than the asset. But the underlying truth — that the people most qualified to judge a craft are the people who practise it — is as true for a peer rental as it was for a medieval bakery. A scratch on a frame, a worn brake pad, a wheel out of true: someone who has owned a bike for twenty years can read all three at a glance. Someone in a remote ticket queue cannot.

So the question is not whether dispute resolution should be local. Of course it should. The question is how to make local resolution accountable to people who are not in the room — to the next renter, to the next owner, to anyone who would like to see whether the guild has been fair across the cases it has heard.

How a DaiZen guild works.

Each asset class has its own guild. The bike guild for bikes. A tool guild when tools arrive. An apartment guild when apartments do. The guild is small — small enough that members know one another, large enough that no one member's bad day decides a case.

Members are vetted. They are bonded — they post a deposit of their own, refundable when they leave in good standing, and reduced if a decision they were part of is later overturned on appeal. They are visible: every guild member has a public identity, a public history of decisions, and a public record of how often their decisions are appealed. We borrowed the structure from the Zünfte and the accountability from the chain.

A case begins when a rental does not settle. The renter and the owner can each upload evidence — photographs, messages, sensor readings from the lock. A small panel of guild members reviews the evidence, talks among themselves, and writes a decision. The decision is recorded on the public chain. So is the reasoning. So is who voted which way.

What the guild does not do.

The guild does not write the rules. The rules — what counts as fair wear, what counts as damage, how the deposit is apportioned — are written by the membership as a whole, in public, and revised openly. A panel hearing a case applies the rules. It does not invent them on the spot.

The guild is also not us. DaiZen the company does not sit on any panel. We do not break ties. We do not have a vote. We build the tools the guild uses, we publish the record of its decisions, and we step back from the part where someone has to decide whose version is the right one. That part belongs to people who know the asset and live near it.

A small first guild.

The bike guild for the Zürich pilot will be small — twelve members to start, drawn from the kind of people who already fix neighbors' bikes for the price of a coffee. Mechanics, long-time commuters, a few of the people who run the city's bike co-ops. Members of DaiZen's first hundred owners are eligible. Membership will be published openly when the pilot opens.

If that work sounds interesting, the door is open. Join the waitlist → and tell us, in a sentence, what you would bring to it.