Il Sole 24 Ore — Italy's leading financial daily — invited Fabrica's founder, Federico Pomi, onto its weekly crypto podcast Cripto, hosted by Vito Lops. The episode looked at real companies using blockchain to strip cost and friction out of regulated industries: parametric insurance from REVO Insurance, and tokenized land ownership from Fabrica.

Toward the end of the interview, Lops drew a parallel that captured the thesis better than any of our own pitch decks have:

"Abbiamo un italiano che ha tokenizzato il dollaro, Paolo Ardoino, e qui abbiamo un altro italiano che sta tokenizzando i terreni in America."

"We have one Italian who tokenized the dollar — Paolo Ardoino — and here we have another Italian who is tokenizing land in America."

He returned to it in the closing thanks:

"Federico Pomi che sta, per quanto riguarda i terreni, replicando lo schema Ardoino sul dollaro."

"Federico Pomi, who for land is replicating the Ardoino model on the dollar."

That is the comparison, on the record, from Italy's most authoritative financial outlet. We did not propose it. The host did.

Five quotes that carry the thirty-six-minute interview, in the order they were spoken. Italian original first, English translation underneath each one.

On the absurdity of medieval paperwork in a digital society — recounting what buying a home in San Francisco actually felt like for someone arriving from Italian tech, expecting Silicon Valley speed:

"Atti di passaggi di proprietà, atti notarili inventati nel medioevo, letteralmente, e continuiamo a utilizzarli all'interno di una società che per il resto si è evoluta a standard digitali."

"Title transfers, notarial deeds invented in the Middle Ages — literally — and we still use them inside a society that has otherwise moved to digital standards."

On the lending niche traditional banks have abandoned — a typical parcel on the Fabrica platform trades for $80,000 to $100,000, precisely the value range where the cost of underwriting destroys a bank's margin:

"Quando si parla di asset di valore inferiore, come un terreno che può valere 80.000 dollari, per la banca quello non diventa più conveniente. Di conseguenza c'è questa immensa nicchia di terreni che oggi non hanno connettività con il sistema finanziario tradizionale, e grazie alla blockchain improvvisamente si apre questa liquidità."

"When you're talking about lower-value assets, like a parcel of land that might be worth $80,000, it stops being economic for the bank. The result is this enormous niche of land that has no connection to the traditional financial system — and thanks to blockchain, that liquidity suddenly opens up."

On tokens as digital primitives — the JPEG analogy, on why a standard format unlocks compounding new applications:

"Una volta che è un'immagine, indipendentemente dal contenuto della fotografia, come una JPEG la puoi utilizzare all'interno di diversi software, mandare da una persona all'altra via email, o stamparla. In modo analogo, con i token, andiamo a creare un contenitore di valore che può essere utilizzato all'interno di numerosi software indipendentemente dal contenuto stesso."

"Once it is an image, regardless of the content of the photograph, you can use a JPEG inside many different software programs, send it person-to-person by email, or print it. In an analogous way, with tokens we create a container of value that can be used inside many different software programs regardless of the content itself."

On tokenization being the present, not just the future — the closing answer of the interview:

"La tokenizzazione è il futuro ed è anche il presente. La stiamo usando quotidianamente. La usiamo con le stablecoin: sono il dollaro tokenizzato. Io la vedo quotidianamente con i terreni tokenizzati."

"Tokenization is the future, and it is already the present. We use it every day. We use it with stablecoins — they are the tokenized dollar. I see it every day with tokenized land."

Lops's own closing line — the host re-states the parallel in his thanks:

"Grazie Federico Pomi che sta, per quanto riguarda i terreni, replicando lo schema Ardoino sul dollaro."

"Federico Pomi, who for land is replicating the Ardoino model on the dollar."

Tether — built by Paolo Ardoino and his team — took the U.S. dollar and gave it a new rail. USDT did not change what the dollar is; it changed how the dollar moves: globally, instantly, programmatically, without intermediaries. The dollar already had the value. The new rail unlocked the rest.

Real estate is the largest asset class in the world, somewhere around $300 trillion. Land is a real share of that. The asset already has value. What it lacks is a rail. Today, transferring U.S. land still looks the way it looked decades ago: notaries, escrow, county recorders, paper deeds, rubber stamps, weeks of processing, several percent in fees. Banks won't touch the long tail because the underwriting math doesn't pencil at $80K parcels.

Fabrica gives land that rail. Property goes into a purpose-built legal trust. A token on Ethereum controls the trust. Transfer the token, and ownership transfers — in minutes, online, with stablecoins or a bank transfer, with the legal certainty the existing U.S. real-estate system requires. Once the asset is a standard, the rest follows: collateralized lending, peer-to-peer transfer, programmable financial stacks. Tether for the dollar. Fabrica for land. Same shape, one layer further into the real economy.

The full English translation of the interview is below. The original Italian episode is on Il Sole 24 Ore's podcast site and on Spotify.

Cripto — Il Sole 24 Ore. Host: Vito Lops. Guests: Simone Lazzaro (co-founder, REVO Insurance) and Federico Pomi (founder, Fabrica). Aired November 26, 2025.

Vito Lops: Welcome back to Cripto. Vito Lops here with you every week to bring you the latest from this fascinating but controversial world. Many of you have written in over the past few days about Bitcoin's price action — it is being affected by traditional equity-market volatility and by what is generally a bit of a financial drought. Liquidity is somewhat tight right now, so highly liquid, sensitive assets are feeling it.

But today we don't want to talk about price action. We want to talk about what we care about most: the technology underneath the crypto world, and concrete examples of how companies are using blockchain. To do that we have two guests — one in the studio, Simone Lazzaro, one of the founders of the insurance-tech REVO. Welcome, Simone.

Simone Lazzaro: Thanks Vito, thanks for the invitation.

Vito Lops: And we are also joined from San Francisco — and we thank him because over there, when we are recording, it is the middle of the night, so a double thank-you to Federico Pomi, founder of Fabrica, a startup he will now tell us about and how it connects to blockchain. Welcome Federico.

Federico Pomi: Thank you, good morning.

Vito Lops: Blockchain — we know it is the technology that holds up the whole crypto world we have been telling the story of since late 2022 on this podcast. The Bitcoin purists call it "timechain," they pick a different name for this underlying technology, this distributed ledger, to put it simply. But what is fascinating is that there are companies — like the ones we will hear from today — that are already using it for very concrete cases.

Simone, first of all: how did you discover this technology, how did you become passionate about it, and how did you decide to put it into your company — which I'll remind everyone is listed on the Italian stock exchange?

Simone Lazzaro: I came to this world at the end of 2016, beginning of 2017. On one hand I was drawn to what I was reading about Bitcoin and Satoshi Nakamoto — the more crypto side. On the other I understood that there was this technology, blockchain, which was being translated into Italian with this strange and frankly ugly term: "distributed ledgers." So I started looking for use cases, angles to apply this technology in insurance. I have been in insurance for over twenty years, so the goal was to find a case to apply blockchain to.

In 2020 the idea for REVO was born. We founded the company between 2020 and 2021 and decided that one of REVO's strategic pillars would be parametric insurance. Parametric insurance is friendlier to the customer because it moves from the concept of "damage" to the concept of "event" — cause and effect.

For example: if you buy a REVO policy that covers you against a flight delay or cancellation, we use a smart contract to write that insurance contract on a blockchain. We then query airport databases, and if your flight is delayed or cancelled, you are paid automatically into your bank account or onto your credit card. No bureaucracy. So you can see how immediate it was for us to think of parametric insurance and to think of it on the blockchain.

Vito Lops: So insurance — which in the popular imagination feels a bit like the old economy, given the nature and history of the business — meets a cutting-edge technology that not everyone has even approached yet. An entrepreneurial oxymoron, you could call it.

Simone Lazzaro: Yes, a nice entrepreneurial oxymoron — to speed up processes and make them safer.

Vito Lops: Federico, what about you? Tell us your story from San Francisco — why are you there?

Federico Pomi: My story is a bit different. I come from a tech background. I started writing code when I was a kid, so I have always been drawn to anything new in technology. I applied that in different ways. I am Milanese, I grew up in Italy, and I had entrepreneurial activity in Italy in the 2000s. I founded a project called Milano Tonight, which became tonight.eu — a portal for nightlife, events, restaurants. I ran it for about a decade and then I went to work at Vodafone, where I ran innovation for Vodafone Italy and the relationships with startups. It was through Vodafone that I came to California — Vodafone had a corporate venture arm here in Silicon Valley, and I came over to run their investments. I lived this experience for a few months, fell in love with the place, and decided to stay. I moved here about ten years ago.

In San Francisco I was exposed very early to all things crypto, Bitcoin, then Ethereum, and all the blockchain applications.

Vito Lops: So even in terms of mindset, since there was more openness here than in Europe?

Federico Pomi: Without a doubt — this is the place where new technologies get invented, tested, sometimes thrown away, sometimes adopted. It's the best place to have that exposure early, whether it's self-driving cars or some new token, some new experimentation of any kind. This is the city where you see it before anywhere else.

Vito Lops: And when did the lightbulb go off — the idea to start your company? Tell us what it does.

Federico Pomi: My company is called Fabrica, and what we do is tokenize real estate — we put property titles on the blockchain. How did I get there? It's actually a very personal story.

When I moved here, I decided to buy a home in San Francisco. With the optimism, even the naïveté, of someone from tech, I expected a magical, super-modern Silicon Valley experience. What I actually found was extremely traditional, bureaucratic — a mountain of paperwork, notaries, lawyers, fingerprints, rubber stamps, the county system. The exact opposite of what we imagine from Italy when we think of the United States and the speed of the private sector. I would even say the American system is more bureaucratic and complex than the Italian one — which, as an Italian, surprised me considerably.

With curiosity, I started asking myself: how is this possible? Why all these intermediaries for what looked like a relatively simple operation? I started studying how the U.S. real-estate model and real-estate technology actually work, and I saw clear gaps. At the same time I was beginning to play with the first blockchain smart contracts, and I immediately saw it: these kinds of operations are obviously going to run on digital systems someday. It is absurd that we still use title transfers and notarial deeds invented in the Middle Ages — literally — inside a society that has otherwise moved to digital standards. So we founded Fabrica.

What we do is help people transfer real property fully digitally.

Vito Lops: So you tokenize land — not buildings, but land.

Federico Pomi: Correct. What we do is tokenize land. More precisely, we tokenize the title to the land. Today our focus is land — though legally it is very similar for buildings. A landowner comes to us and says: I want to digitize the ownership of this land. We issue a token that represents the land, and from that point on the person can operate the property by operating directly on the token. When they sell the token, the buyer instantly becomes the legal owner. Or, even better, when they want to use the land to obtain a loan, they can use the token directly as collateral. The loan is issued online, on-chain, in seconds, with a clean and fast interface, without all the costs of intermediaries and the traditional system that they would otherwise have had to go through.

Vito Lops: So this is a concrete example of what we often discuss on Cripto as a possible mega-trend of the coming years: real-world asset tokenization. A very down-to-earth example — literally, in this case, since we're talking about land.

Vito Lops: Simone, do you want to go deeper into what you do — since the Cripto audience is fairly expert, you can get into the detail.

Simone Lazzaro: Gladly. On the blockchain we essentially do two things. We manage surety bonds on blockchain — we were the first in Italy to put surety bonds on a blockchain. We do this because in 2023, in the new procurement code, ANAC (the National Anti-Corruption Authority) identified a problem: surety bonds are often counterfeited, there is a lot of fraud. The legislator's response was to require digital signatures on these bonds and to make it possible to register them on distributed ledgers — i.e., on blockchain. We take the bond and put it on our two blockchains, one public and one private — specifically Hyperledger Fabric and Polygon — and we provide gas to the network through our wallet, which holds MATIC. The legislator added a further benefit: policies recorded this way can be discounted 10% to the buyer.

The other thing — and it is our core business — is putting parametric contracts on blockchain. This year we crossed 100,000 parametric policies sold. There are 100,000 Italians who have an insurance contract sitting on a blockchain — most of them probably don't know it. Of those, 40,000 are tied to a very Italian solution: through our agreement with the spiagge.it app, we insure the rain risk on a beach umbrella or sunbed rental. You pick your umbrella in the app, you buy the coverage, we write the smart contract and put it on the blockchain. We use the GPS coordinates of the beach club to query our weather oracle. If it rains, the smart-contract condition triggers, the system emails the customer asking for an IBAN, and an instant payment is fired off — all within minutes. Privacy is handled via hashing on a private chain (Hyperledger Fabric), with selective use of Ethereum.

Vito Lops: From parametric insurance to beach umbrellas to land — blockchain is spreading into the real economy. Federico, on land, can you go deeper? What about size, how the business works, can someone in Italy buy a token and easily invest in a parcel in California?

Federico Pomi: Absolutely. First, a word on land itself, because I think it is interesting. People think of real estate as the largest asset class in the world — around $300 trillion. Land specifically is talked about less. When we say "real estate," people think of houses. But in places like the United States, land is a huge share of that real-estate value: tens of millions of parcels. There is a market for land — people buy and sell every single day — and the value varies enormously, even more than for houses, because a parcel can be a small lot in the middle of nowhere or a high-value parcel near a metropolitan area. Values range from a few hundred dollars to hundreds of millions. The average parcel transacted on our platform is in the $80,000 to $100,000 range, but we see all of it.

The main quality of being tokenized is that the result is a standard. When someone buys the token that represents the parcel, it does not matter where the parcel is physically — it could be in California, in a small county somewhere, or in the future possibly outside the United States. Anyone can buy it. There is an online marketplace, people can go and purchase directly using stablecoins or by paying from their bank, and within minutes they become the legal owner of that parcel.

Vito Lops: And you mentioned the token can also be used to unlock additional liquidity — the other big theme of real-world-asset tokenization, which on a previous episode we discussed could even reframe how we think about M2 as a measure of liquidity, since assets that today are hard to use as collateral suddenly can be. How does using the token as collateral for new loans actually work?

Federico Pomi: Correct. The token, being a standard, can be used as collateral inside other smart contracts that issue credit lines or, effectively, the equivalent of a mortgage. When the token is used this way, the token representing the land is held in escrow by a smart contract, the loan is disbursed — there are liquidity providers, lenders, who supply the capital — and software automatically coordinates all the movements. No paperwork, no traditional contracts; everything is governed by smart contracts.

This is very powerful especially for assets that historically have struggled to get liquidity through traditional models. Why? Because the cost of executing the operation is suddenly extremely efficient and low. With about two dollars you can stand up a loan, whereas the traditional system requires an entire infrastructure of people and physical work to set it up — which kills the bank's margin on lower-value assets.

If you look at a house in America, going to the bank and getting a loan is straightforward, because the value of the home itself lets the bank earn an attractive margin. When you talk about lower-value assets — a parcel of land worth $80,000 — that no longer pencils for the bank. The result is this enormous niche of land that today has no connection to the traditional financial system. Thanks to blockchain, that liquidity suddenly opens up, and all these possibilities become accessible in an incredibly modern way.

Vito Lops: So blockchain is a bridge to extraordinary efficiency in business costs. Is that what pushed REVO to adopt it, Simone? Efficiency, savings, speed?

Simone Lazzaro: There are two reasons. One is efficiency — speed, savings, and using the technology for what it was actually invented to do. The second is security, using blockchain as a tool to prevent fraud, which in insurance is unfortunately still very widespread. These are the two reasons that pushed us to analyze blockchain — and that have also led us to look at investments in blockchain companies. We watch the space closely, because we believe it will produce real developments for insurance.

Vito Lops: And looking ahead?

Simone Lazzaro: Let's start with regulation. The European insurance regulator, EIOPA, in March of this year published its technical advice to the European Commission. It expressed a very clear concept: one-to-one. That means that any insurance company operating in Europe that decides to invest, directly or indirectly, in crypto assets or stablecoins must set aside safety capital equal to the value of the investment — collateralizing it one-to-one. A very prudent position, designed to protect the end customer.

In terms of where the sector is going, I see three lines. First: increasing use of blockchain for the reasons we mentioned — speed, efficiency, security — in parametric and beyond. Second — and this connects to the first — stablecoins, particularly the more compliance-solid ones like USDC and Tether. We see them as potentially the last mile of payment in insurance: fast, efficient, and crucially they cross borders. All insurance companies — Italian, European, global — are themselves reinsured, and reinsurers are everywhere: London, the U.S., Japan, Bermuda. Settling those relationships often takes weeks or months. If we can combine blockchain (efficiency, speed) with stablecoins (payments), the process becomes much more efficient than today.

Third, we shouldn't forget the digital risks. Three categories: custody of wallets (a service banks are starting to offer, which itself can and for banks must be insured); exploits and code malfunctions (the U.S. startup Chainproof, backed by Sompo of Japan and Munich Re, is one example of insurance against this); and operational risk — errors, fraud, theft — where Europe is increasingly demanding insurance solutions, and we at REVO are looking at it.

But to be clear about what we cannot solve with parametric or non-parametric insurance: we cannot cover the volatility of digital assets — those are market risks, and they cannot be insured. And we cannot insure the more modern solutions like cross-chain bridges, where it would be extraordinarily complicated to prove where the error occurred.

Vito Lops: Very interesting — that insurance can use blockchain both to make itself more efficient and as a business model for new insurance products. We're glad to be telling these case histories on Cripto today.

Simone mentioned Tether, and that prompts a thought, Federico. We have one Italian who tokenized the dollar — Paolo Ardoino — and here we have another Italian who is tokenizing land in America. With all the respect of the case, what do you think of the comparison?

Federico Pomi: Clearly very pleased with the comparison, given Tether's success. If we look at tokenization more broadly, the way I see it — it is essentially a roadmap of things that are happening over time. Blockchains were born with natively digital assets, the cryptocurrencies, and then little by little they expanded into the real world. In that expansion, different asset classes are brought on board one at a time. We started with assets that — without taking anything away from any project — are technically simpler to tokenize: things like the dollar, and now stocks (we are seeing many U.S. stocks coming onto the blockchain). And we are progressively moving toward more complex asset classes like real estate, where the regulation and the differences between one asset and another are harder to handle technically.

What's fascinating is watching this shift of asset classes from traditional systems — paper or centralized digital — toward a digitalized world that is decentralized and interoperable. You end up with these tokens that are genuinely standards. I like to use the comparison with the JPEG: once an image is a JPEG, regardless of its content, you can use it inside countless software programs, send it from one person to another by email, print it. Everything is standardized thanks to the JPEG. With tokens it's analogous — you create a container of value that can be used inside many different software programs, regardless of the content itself. And that creates an enormous amount of opportunity to build new applications and new businesses. That, to me, is the real reach of tokenization for digitizing assets globally.

Vito Lops: One of the most interesting things that emerges from interviewing the two of you is that blockchain has so far also been used to create a lot of valueless tokens. We know that's part of why Cripto exists — for financial education — because 99.99% of tokens in circulation today struggle to find a use case or any value beyond speculation. But if tokens become the representation of something that already has value in the world — a real asset — the conversation, and the image of the underlying technology, changes radically. What do you think, Simone?

Simone Lazzaro: Vito, you're exactly right. Trying to give use cases to the technology is the challenge for the digital world. It's what led us to think of the technology not as an end in itself, but as a means to gain efficiency and security. When we look at Italian or European fintech startups, one of the first things we look for is the use case — that's where you actually understand whether there is concrete, intentional use of the technology and a possible go-to-market that makes sense, or whether it's an idea, however brilliant, that's an end in itself and unlikely to find a market.

Vito Lops: And on interoperability, Federico — that's one of the killer applications of this sector's future, the fact that the token can communicate with multiple platforms?

Federico Pomi: Without a doubt one of the most powerful things about tokenization. Initially you see the first-order benefits — speed, immediacy, efficiency. Then, gradually, the ability to put these applications together like Lego blocks. The token becomes a digital primitive, and that opens up new combinations: different business models stitched together in completely new ways that weren't possible before. That opens the door to entrepreneurial imagination — new ideas unlocked by the blockchain.

Vito Lops: Almost wrapping up — Simone, what about public vs. private blockchains, and how you choose?

Simone Lazzaro: We obviously respect the control processes — we are listed, we are in a regulated sector, our data is published quarterly. On partner selection, we have a preference for Italian partners where possible, including for blockchain implementation. We have an internal team that handles all the design work, and a co-managed internal/external setup for development. On the type of chain, our current approach was set about three years ago — but this technology runs fast, very fast, so we are already thinking about how to evolve our approach for the near future. In short: design and idea internal; for execution we look for the companies we trust the most. If they are Italian, even better. But on blockchain build-out specifically, we cannot always stay inside the country — we have to look outside. We will see if that changes in the coming years.

Vito Lops: Federico, you are if I'm not mistaken on Ethereum as the preferred platform.

Federico Pomi: Correct. Until today we have been on Ethereum. The system could in principle run on any modern blockchain, but Ethereum is the gold standard, in a sense, for applications — so that's where we are.

Vito Lops: Last question, the same for both of you — is tokenization really the future, and where will it take us?

Simone Lazzaro: I personally think yes — absolutely the future. It will take us toward a more efficient future where even an old-fashioned sector like insurance gains in friendliness toward customers and, thanks to concrete use cases, becomes more usable for everyday citizens as the technology spreads.

Vito Lops: Federico, the last word to you. Is tokenization the future?

Federico Pomi: Tokenization is the future, and it is already the present. We use it every day. We use it with stablecoins — they are the tokenized dollar. I see it every day with tokenized land. And gradually it will become daily use: assets will simply move around as tokens instead of as paper documents. A conversion of the entire old world to this new infrastructure — happening unevenly, on different timelines, but possibly accelerating in 2026, which many are calling one of the most important years for giving real impulse to this process.

Vito Lops: Which we at Cripto, of course, will keep telling you about every week. All that's left is to thank our guests. Thank you, Simone Lazzaro of REVO, for telling us how the insurance world can use, and is already using, blockchain technology.

Simone Lazzaro: Thank you Vito, thanks for the invitation.

Vito Lops: And thank you, Federico Pomi, who for land is replicating the Ardoino model on the dollar. Thanks for being here on Cripto.

Federico Pomi: Thank you very much, it was a pleasure.

Original episode: "Ecco come le aziende stanno usando la blockchain", Cripto, Il Sole 24 Ore, 26 November 2025. Host: Vito Lops. Guests: Simone Lazzaro (REVO Insurance) and Federico Pomi (Fabrica). Translation by Fabrica from the original Italian audio.