Killercatfish turns energy-bleeding community ice rinks into self-sustaining, energy-positive facilities that grow food and run sovereign compute — proving a replicable closed-loop platform on the back of an asset class that's quietly dying.
A community rink is a machine for moving heat — fighting its own poorly-insulated shell, bleeding money every hour the lights are on.
Energy is the killer. Refrigeration runs the bill while rates climb. Older rinks are one compressor failure away from a closure decision.
Everything useful gets thrown away. Waste heat vented outside. Zamboni snow and meltwater drained. Power drawn at peak and never offset.
Nobody does the work. The fixes exist and the incentives are real — but rink operators have no time, capital, or expertise to assemble them. So they don't.
We don't pitch a science project. We stack three businesses on one building — each profitable on its own, each de-risking the layer above it.
Capture the refrigeration plant's waste heat to displace heating and melt the Zamboni snow; over-build rooftop and parking-canopy solar to push the building energy-positive. The economics are known — utility, state, and federal incentives cover the majority of capex, and the savings plus 20-year solar income are real cash flow. This is what makes the capital safe.
Recovered heat and reclaimed meltwater run a year-round greenhouse and aquaponics operation inside the building's footprint — fish, fresh greens, and honey grown on energy that used to be a cost. A genuine controlled-environment closed loop, not a data center with a garden bolted on.
An energy-positive building has the two scarcest things in computing: surplus clean power and a built-in heat sink. Each node hosts a GPU compute node whose waste heat feeds back into the greenhouse. Every rink we convert becomes a federated node in the HKOS network — local inference, data kept sovereign, peer-to-peer coordination. The compute monetizes stranded surplus and returns heat to the farm. This is the layer that compounds.
A rink solves the chicken-and-egg problem of every closed-loop and edge-compute venture at once. The hard inputs come free with the building.
Industrial electrical service and a refrigeration cooling sink — the two things edge compute is starved for — are already on site.
Waste heat, snow, and water are flowing already. The agriculture loop has inputs before we build anything new.
A travel sport where families spend hours in the building — instant brand, community proof, and goodwill a warehouse never gets.
Owners facing energy-driven closure are looking for a lifeline. That's the way in — and the replication pipeline to nodes two through N.
The capital isn't funding one rink — a single node is largely incentive-funded. It funds the company that makes Node Zero a repeatable product.
Hard energy assets and incentive-backed cash flow, in a market of thousands of distressed rinks. Underwritten like infrastructure.
HKOS — a federated network of sovereign compute nodes that grows more valuable with every rink converted. The part that justifies venture scale.
The thesis isn't "ice rinks." It's any building with stranded heat and power can become a node. The rink is simply the sharpest wedge — distressed, sympathetic, and ready.