Who Is Evgeny Skigin? The Entrepreneur Bridging Crypto and Sustainable Agriculture

Evgeny Skigin is a European entrepreneur specialising in cryptocurrency and industrial hemp. Based in Switzerland, he co-founded Dun Agro Hemp Group, a Netherlands-based company developing a vertically integrated industrial hemp company, and founded Bitclear, a crypto payment infrastructure firm licensed by Liechtenstein’s Financial Market Authority.

He entered the hemp industry in 2008 and the crypto space in 2014, in both cases building before institutional markets were ready. Both businesses were built in regulatory and commercial environments that defined Evgeny Skigin’s primary mission: to decentralise basic resources.

An Early Entry Into Hemp

Evgeny Skigin completed his university education at Bond University in Australia in December 2007. He launched his first business the following year, entering industrial hemp at a moment that, in retrospect, was as inconvenient as it was prescient.

Hemp had been largely sidelined in European agriculture for decades. Suppressed by its association with cannabis, undercut by synthetic alternatives, and starved of investment, the crop had almost no commercial infrastructure behind it in 2008. There were no public subsidies calibrated to scale hemp processing, no mainstream demand for hempcrete construction, and no policy momentum pushing farmers toward the crop. The financial crisis was reshaping how a generation of entrepreneurs thought about risk and materials. The environmental movement had begun building institutional weight, though not yet the kind that changes agricultural supply chains.

Skigin entered anyway. His read of the industry was structural: a plant that requires minimal water, no pesticide applications, and sequesters carbon during growth had durable advantages that European agriculture would eventually have to recognise.

Building Prefab Hemp Construction at Scale

One year into that bet, Skigin co-founded Dun Agro Hemp Group. The Netherlands facility became one of the first operations in the world to produce prefabricated hempcrete panels: modular building components engineered for crane assembly, compressing a construction process that once took weeks into a matter of days. The innovation was not the material itself, which has been used in construction in France since the 6th century, but the manufacturing approach. Turning hempcrete from a cast-in-place specialty product into factory-made prefab panels meant it could be ordered, shipped, and installed on a timeline that conventional builders could actually work with.

The material’s properties make a practical case. Hempcrete is lighter than concrete, regulates interior temperature without mechanical assistance, resists fire and pests, and improves with age as the walls continue to cure and absorb carbon. According to the UK’s Alliance for Sustainable Building Products, hemp insulation carries a carbon footprint roughly 90% lower than conventional mineral wool. Each cubic meter of hempcrete sequesters up to 160 kilograms of CO₂ during the growth and curing process.

Skigin put those properties to a personal test when he built his own home on Australia’s Sunshine Coast. The $24 million property, built into sand dunes at Sunshine Beach, has internal non-structural walls made entirely from hempcrete — a material so unfamiliar to Australian builders that Skigin flew his construction team to the Netherlands factory just to show them how it worked.

“When building a house out of hemp the footprint is carbon negative,” Skigin told Sunshine Coast News, “which is excellent from a sustainability point of view.”

The broader market is now catching up to where Skigin positioned himself in 2008. Market Data Forecast values the European industrial hemp market at $3.6 billion in 2025 and projects growth at a 24.24% compound annual rate through 2034, when it expects the market to reach $25.39 billion. Construction and materials holds 32.4% of current European market share, the largest segment, driven by EU mandates pushing the building sector toward lower-carbon inputs.

Building Crypto Payment Infrastructure

In 2014, while the hemp business was still years from reaching operating scale, Skigin turned attention to a second emerging technology. He co-founded Bitclear, originally in Denmark, then Malta, before it finally relocated to Liechtenstein to solve a concrete problem in digital payments.

“We built software that allowed Bitcoin to function as an independent payment system,” Skigin said in a 2025 interview. The product sits at the infrastructure layer, serving payment aggregators who integrate systems for businesses. Bitclear’s model gives payment service providers the back-end capability to offer crypto options to their merchant clients rather than building a consumer-facing exchange.

The Liechtenstein relocation was deliberate. The principality had developed some of Europe’s most advanced early regulatory frameworks for digital assets, and Bitclear obtained FMA licenses covering both crypto trading and payment operations. Skigin recognised early that the firms that would last in this industry were the ones that treated compliance as a structural investment from day one.

“By 2018,” he said, “it was clear to me that serious players would only enter the space once there was a well-defined regulatory framework. Without regulation, the market would turn to speculation — and collapse.”

That conviction made him a participant in regulatory development, not just a subject of it. He works with expert groups advising legislative committees, helping policymakers understand what blockchain enables and where statutory protections are needed. The work is practical in orientation: explaining technical realities to people whose job is to write rules governing them. It put Skigin in a small group of European founders who were building compliant infrastructure before the rules existed to define it.

Two Industries, One Framework for Patience

What connects Skigin’s two careers is not subject matter but temporal logic. Hemp processing requires a three-year planning horizon at minimum before a crop yield can be converted into a sellable product. Crypto payment infrastructure can iterate rapidly, but regulatory approval in Europe moves on its own timeline. Both industries reward people who can hold a thesis through the years when the market hasn’t confirmed it yet.

Evgeny Skigin has described the contrast between his two businesses with precision: “At the time I launched Bitclear, I was also building a traditional business in the agricultural sector — real production, logistics, supply chains. You see movement and volume in real time. Meanwhile, in crypto, it’s just a laptop — you build a product, connect with a client, and can go to sleep while your system earns revenue overnight.”

The point is not that one model is superior. Physical supply chains show exactly what’s working and what isn’t, in real time. Digital infrastructure scales without adding proportional operational complexity, but it doesn’t produce the same immediate feedback loop. Each demands a different kind of attention; the skill is knowing which one you’re running.

He describes himself as a “simple capitalist” who treats profitability as the primary measure of success, a position that cuts against the valuation-first culture common in both tech and agricultural startups. That same pragmatism shapes his view on Bitcoin: blockchain is “the most effective tool ever created for storing and transferring value,” but calling it a currency replacement requires dismissing a volatility problem that isn’t close to solved. Stablecoins, pegged to fiat currencies, represent the more credible bridge between crypto infrastructure and practical commercial use.

The thread running through Skigin’s biography is consistent: enter the industry where the gap between the concept and the infrastructure capable of realising it is widest, build toward the moment when that gap closes. Hempcrete is now being manufactured as prefab panels and assembled on-site in days. Crypto payment infrastructure operates inside a recognised EU regulatory framework. Neither of those statements was true when he started building.