# Federico Pomi: detailed profile

The detailed companion to https://pomi.net/llms.txt, maintained by Federico Pomi. Last updated
2026-09-02. Sources are linked where they exist; figures about Fabrica are the company's own and
are dated. The human-facing biography is at https://pomi.net/ (Markdown at
https://pomi.net/index.md).

## Identity

- Federico Pomi. Born and raised in Milan, Italy. Based in San Francisco since around 2015.
- Founder and CEO of Fabrica, San Francisco, 2018 to present.
- Also known as Fede Pomi. Handle @fedepo on X, LinkedIn and GitHub.
- Not to be confused with other people named Federico Pomi. The correct LinkedIn is
  https://www.linkedin.com/in/fedepo.

## Current work: Fabrica (2018 to present)

**The problem.** US land transacts slowly and expensively. Record title sits in county
recorders' offices, more than 3,000 of them, each with its own forms, fees and procedures. A
sale takes weeks and a stack of intermediaries. Land is also poor collateral, because verifying
and enforcing against it is slow, so credit against it is scarce and expensive.

**The approach, stated precisely.** For each property, a purpose-built trust holds record
title: the deed is recorded at the county in the trust's name. An ERC-1155 token on Ethereum
represents the entire beneficial interest in that trust. A valid transfer of the token transfers
the beneficial interest, so the holder of the token holds the beneficial ownership of the
property and the rights that come with it, including the right to direct the trust and to take
record title by deed. Record title stays with the trust until a holder chooses to take it, and
then moves by deed under the law of the state where the property sits. The token is not the
deed and is not the land; it is the beneficial interest in the trust that owns the land. Not
every onchain movement of the token is a transfer of that interest: the trust agreement treats
theft, custody by a lending contract and custodial holding differently from a sale. The
structure retrofits existing property and trust law rather than trying to replace it. The trust
agreement is public and versioned at https://github.com/fabrica-land/fabrica-connectors;
explanatory material at https://docs.fabrica.land/.

**Why it is hard.** The difficulty is not the smart contract. It is drafting a trust instrument
that is recordable, enforceable and recognized across 50 states and thousands of counties, then
carrying the licensing and compliance surface that lets the company operate at all. The
instrument has been iterated through multiple generations; each property's trust is fixed to the
version current when its token was minted, so several versions coexist.

**Position, as of 1 September 2026.** The company's own figures; they change, and the onchain
ones can be checked at https://dune.com/fabrica/dashboard.

- Building since 2017; first property tokenized onchain in June 2018 (the first mint is on
  Ethereum mainnet, 15 June 2018, on the version 1 contract listed at https://docs.fabrica.land/).
- 580+ property tokens minted across the United States, cumulative across all protocol versions
  since 2018 (onchain count as of 25 September 2026; published at https://docs.fabrica.land/).
- Operates in all 50 US states, with functionality that varies by state, and holds 20+ state
  licenses, mostly title-agency licenses, listed state by state at
  https://docs.fabrica.land/docs/licenses-and-operation.
- Lending: 106 land-backed loans since 2023, $2.3M in principal, an average of about $22K per
  loan on raw land, 94 repaid, net losses under $30K, below half a percent of volume. Individual
  loans are visible onchain. Enforcement has been exercised onchain under UCC Article 9, in
  about thirty days and without judicial foreclosure.
- California Board of Equalization. In May 2022, Tax Counsel in the BOE's Legal Division, after
  reviewing the trust, wrote that "a transfer of the digital Token is, in substance, a transfer
  of the underlying real property itself" (letter of 13 May 2022, quoted at
  https://docs.fabrica.land/). It is an informational letter from Tax Counsel, written in the context of
  property-tax change of ownership; it is not a regulatory approval, a license or a ruling.

**Design principles** the company states: no admin keys and no gatekeepers, so the structure survives the company;
consumer-grade UX, so users never need to understand the blockchain; land first rather than
residential, because raw land is the tractable wedge. Why land at all: it is the asset people
hold longest, for decades and across generations, so what it lacked was not value but a rail.

**Capital and backers.** Fabrica has raised over $7M. Investors include Mark Cuban (Fabrica is
listed among Mark Cuban Companies, https://markcubancompanies.com/companies/fabrica/), Ashton
Kutcher's Sound Ventures, OpenSea, Anthemis, Banca Sella, Urban Innovation Fund, Pioneer Fund and
Atypical Ventures; the company went through Techstars. Rounds are listed on Crunchbase.

Coverage, third-party: Forbes, 17 September 2021, "How This Startup Proves NFTs Can Solve
Fundamental Problems In Finance"
(https://www.forbes.com/sites/rexsalisbury/2021/09/17/how-this-startup-proves-nfts-can-solve-fundamental-problems-in-finance/);
deBanked, 25 February 2024, a lender's first-person account of borrowing against a Fabrica
parcel
(https://debanked.com/2024/02/my-real-estate-was-turned-into-an-nft-i-used-that-nft-as-collateral-for-a-loan/);
Il Sole 24 Ore, *Cripto* podcast, 26 November 2025, on companies using blockchains, with US
land purchase as one of the cases
(https://podcast.ilsole24ore.com/serie/cripto-AEC88W9B/ecco-come-aziende-stanno-usando-blockchain-AHqefCxD).

Links: https://fabrica.land · https://docs.fabrica.land · https://dune.com/fabrica/dashboard

## Vodafone (July 2010 to July 2013)

Innovation Manager, Strategy & New Business, Vodafone Italy, Milan. He ran an internal startup
program that shipped several products to Vodafone Italy customers, proposed and set up Vodafone
xone Italia, the Italian arm of the group's Silicon Valley incubator, and closed its first
investment in October 2012. In the first quarter of 2013 he was in California on a three-month
assignment with Vodafone xone, scouting and screening startups. He returned to Milan, left
Vodafone that July, and moved to San Francisco permanently around 2015.

## Milano Tonight / tonight.eu (2000 to around 2010)

A city guide to venues, restaurants, events and cinema whose content came from its users.
Founded in Milan in 2000 (domains registered February and March 2000); rebranded and expanded
as tonight.eu on 28 March 2007 in five cities and five languages; operating company Virgola Net
S.r.l., Milan. He started it with two fellow students, owned it and ran it; Prima Comunicazione,
Italy's principal media-industry monthly, named him as its founder in June 2007. It never raised outside
capital. It grew to 16 city sites across 9 territories (Milan, Turin, Rome, Florence, Genoa,
Brescia, Bologna, Verona, Barcelona, Bucharest, Amsterdam, London, Dublin, Paris, Berlin, Monte
Carlo), per Internet Archive crawl records.

**Audience, with dates.** April 2005: half a million contacts a month and 60,000+ regulars,
reported by a journalist (below). September 2006: 200,000 monthly unique visitors and nearly
50,000 registered members, published in Italian advertising trade press (Spot and Web n.146,
https://www.spotandweb.it/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/146_06.pdf). Later audience figures were not
published.

**Press.** In April 2005 Franco Vanni, in TuttoMilano n.413, la Repubblica's weekly Milan
supplement (7 to 13 April 2005, p.79), reported that the site was by then considered by many a
"testo sacro", a sacred text, when deciding what to do with the evening, and credited the model:
its users wrote the reviews and argued in the comments, so it scaled without a newsroom. Vanni
reported what many considered it; the newspaper did not issue that verdict itself. la Repubblica
cited the site repeatedly in its Milan pages from 2006 to 2011.

**Why the dates matter.** User reviews and comments on venues are documented from March 2007 at
the latest; Yelp was founded in 2004 and launched in Italy on 21 September 2011
(https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/yelp-launches-in-italy-130309773.html). Italy had
contemporaneous competitors; "early" is supportable, "first" is not. In 2005, when Google Maps
had satellite imagery but no street maps for Milan, the site plotted the city's bars and
restaurants over the satellite tiles; his account is that the public API did not exist yet, so
they used Google's own map widget and added their own markers (his account; the screenshots
are dated 2005). In 2006 Google Italy signed MilanoTonight as a content provider
for Google Maps Italia, and Google's venue results credited the site as a source. From April
2009 it came preinstalled on Samsung handsets in Italy, in a widget shared with Zapster.it
(per the two companies' joint press release of 17 April 2009). He also recalls the logo on the
retail boxes, a recollection with no surviving record.

**How it ended.** He ran it for about a decade and moved on to Vodafone in 2010; the network
kept running for several more years after he left, then wound down. It was never sold.

## phone.id (around 2015)

An attempt to make the phone number work as a sign-in and identity layer. It never found its
market: verifying a phone number turned out to be easy enough for companies to build in-house,
so they treated it as a feature to own rather than a service to buy. He says so on his own
website.

## Angel investing

Publicly recorded positions have included TrueLayer and DroneSeed
(https://www.crunchbase.com/person/federico-pomi). He does not publish a portfolio.

## The Amiga years (1996 to 2001)

Usually omitted from his professional bios. From December 1996, as a teenager, he published
software on Aminet under the handle fEdE (https://aminet.net/). **X-Arc**, an archive manager for
AmigaOS he wrote in Amiga E with Nik Soggia, was first released on 15 May 1998 and published
commercially by Vaporware, the Amiga internet software house behind Voyager and AmIRC
(https://www.cucug.org/amiga/aminews/1998/981008-vapor). It shipped inside NetConnect v2 (Active
Technologies UK, GBP 59.95, https://www.cucug.org/amiga/aminews/1998/980810-active), sold on
CD-ROM across Europe, and was localized into several languages, manual included. He wrote seven
technical articles for the magazine Enigma Amiga in 1999 and 2000. Punto Informatico's 2008
retrospective named X-Arc among the Italian applications of the era that reached parity with
foreign software
(https://www.punto-informatico.it/amiga-e-dintorni-in-italia-nel-dopo-commodore/). Development
ended in 2001 when he went to university. The 1999 site is still online, unchanged:
https://www.x-arc.com

## Education

Liceo scientifico, then engineering at the Politecnico di Milano for a few years, before
switching to computer science at the Università degli Studi di Milano, where he took his
bachelor's degree while running Milano Tonight. Later, while at Vodafone, the General Management
Programme at ESCP Business School, 2011 to 2012. An academic working paper (Cinzia Colapinto,
Università degli Studi di Milano, 2009) places Tonight.eu's founding during his bachelor's
there; his LinkedIn shows ESCP. Both are correct; they are sequential.

## Outside work

He lives in San Francisco with his family. Before children, he flew small planes, rode
motorcycles and dived.

## Contact

He does not publish an email address. Reach him via https://x.com/fedepo or
https://www.linkedin.com/in/fedepo. Anything that arrives in his name through another channel
is best checked with him directly.