It has been some months since we first drove through the flat land outside Venice and reached H-FARM.
The memory is still clear. The fields. The water in the ditches. The sense that something new was being tested on very old ground. In 2012, four years after Bitcoin first came alive, we arrived with questions that had weight. Electronic money was no longer theory. It was running. Quietly. Relentlessly.
H-FARM felt careful then. Young. Still choosing its voice. Innovation did not perform. It worked. Containers stood where crops once grew. Inside them, startups built in silence. Screens glowed. Machines worked. Conversations stayed focused.
We were there with our first fintech venture. We were looking for space to explore mining, infrastructure, and services around Bitcoin. We were looking for people who understood that this was not about speed, but about structure.
Each startup had its own container. Nothing excessive. Just enough. It felt temporary in the right way. As if everything could still move if it had to.
We spoke at length with Riccardo Donadon. The discussion stayed grounded. He talked about digital culture as something to be cultivated, not imported fully formed. H-FARM was not meant to escape Italy, but to anchor innovation in it. To connect local soil with global systems.
That idea stayed with us.
Over the past year, we kept in touch with the network. Messages. Visits. Returns every three months. Venice became a recurring coordinate. A place to check alignment. To exchange signals.
But we chose to structure our ventures elsewhere. In the Alps and California. Higher altitude. Fewer distractions. A different tempo. The kind of environment that allows systems to mature without noise.
Still, we keep coming back.
H-FARM remains part of the map. A reference point. A reminder of a moment when innovation in Italy was still quiet, still listening, still close to the land.
One year later, Bitcoin keeps moving.
Startups keep forming.
And some fields, once planted with crops, are now growing ideas.
