I was so excited to host the first blockchain meetup in Gombe and Borno (Maiduguri) states. These States have been greatly hit by the insurgency in Nigeria and I wanted to see how we can immediately begin to deploy some of the solutions on the blockchain to help people continue their lives and make good use of the technological opportunities. I gave an overview of what blockchain is and how deploying blockchain solutions can help ease day to day living in these hostile regions since to a large extend trust is now a big problem due to the constant boko haram’s (insurgents) attacks on the region.
The two meetups had few developers with most of the participants who are involved in different SMEs so I used the opportunity to present aeternity ventures and also some of the funding opportunities with the aeternity foundation and how they can also take advantage of those opportunities. There was a question about how cheap it is to deploy businesses on aeternity and how easy it is to do so?
Both hosting hubs are new hubs that are trying to bring blockchain technology to both states and we had in attendance a robotics center in Gombe who sent some representatives witness the meetup and another NGO Raube Zaman (an NGO that is promoting women participation in Technology in Nigeria) also had some of her members join the meetup
While in Abuja it was a complete dev hangout with facebook developers community and it was really exciting because we are able to demonstrate how smart contracts works we are able to write, compile and deploy a smart contract with a simple bucket list aepp. I invited one of the my meetup participants (Mr. Goodness) to come take one of the sessions because he has done a lot with sophia syntax and he is confident demonstrating it. So he was able to do a demo with the bucket list aepp he built from the dacade challenge and show the dev guys how to play around sophia. We had a chat with some of the dev building some aepps on how to deploy on the blockchain.
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You can also watch the part of the discussions here:
Maiduguri 2 - YouTube, Maiduguri - YouTube, Abuja Dev Hangout 1 - YouTube, Abuja Dev Hangout 2 - YouTube, Abuja Dev Hangout 3 - YouTube, Gombe meetup 2 - YouTube, Gombe meetup 1 - YouTube