if 2023 ended 🚀, 2024 started 🚀 🚀 🚀

after spending nye in lisbon, i moved to milan visiting my brother (who lives in a small town nearby)

the main reason i went to milan was to attend the 1st network state meetup in italy, were i've been invited to talk in a roundtable/panel with the other web3 italian communities that are active in our country

so i figured i might visit my brother for a week or so, meet some of my old friends and colleagues in milan, join the event and then head back to rome

i'm linked to milan because i've been studying at polytechnic university of milan for a year there in person (then covid hit, and i moved back to rome)

i was working with a startup there and so each time i'm milan i visit their office and say hi!

i don't like milan that much, but i realized it's still more dynamic than my hometown rome, where i've been feeling stuck lately

i figured that i can't stay in rome for a long time without moving around the world for some days to feel motivated again, and this trip to lisbon + milan was cool after spending december in rome

so as much as i don't like it, milan has for sure something more to offer to me in terms of energy, vibe, ppl etc..

workwise, next week we are releasing split3 alpha version, to be tested before our official launch in ethdenver (we're on track w.r.t. our roadmap!)

the app seems very smooth, let's see what users thinks and iterate on their feedbacks

in the meantime we are still working on builder.fi, with much more responsibilities as we are also shaping up the tech roadmap at this point, excited to keep building on it

since it wasn't enough for us, we decided to participate in the ethglobal online lfgho hackathon building a mobile native app based on $gho (aave stablecoin), stay tuned for the actual project!

something kind of unexpected happened as well: i've been selected as a recipient for the optimism rpgf 3 (retro active funding) with my project findcaster (built with antimo and phil)

this means that we've been rewarded retroactively for our contribution to the optimism collective (we were eligible cause we built on top of farcaster which runs on optimism)

next week is very important because builders garden will hopefully soon be an an actual company, making more official our efforts in creating this mvp studio and launching many projects along this year

this makes total sense given the great results that we already earned in the past 2 months

one thing that i realized in these first days of 2024 is that the work we did with urbe.eth, our network and in general our contribution to the ecosystem in the last two years are really paying off

it's always good to take sometime and realized what you achieved, and incredible thinking how and where we started

i feel lucky to be here where i am today, but i would not be generous with myself if i'd say that it's been only luck

i put a lot of hard work and dedication, and that felt much easier because i've always been passion driven

so today i say gg lemon, but tomorrow i'll start again pushing myself further with new challenges

keep building 🫡