ENDING THE MONTH ON A HIGH NOTEš
Web3 Afrika Dev Roundup July 25-29TH more funding announcements+web3 in Africa +web3 corner +Technical corner +NGENI's week recap
āØRELEVANT NEWS funding announcements
ā„Ivory Coast-based fintech startup Bizao has raised $8.2m in Series A funding to expand across Africa.Ā
Founded in 2019,Bizao, present in over 10 African countries, hopes to accelerate its geographical footprint across the continent and invest in the design of new lines of products and services with this raise. The funding round saw participation from investors like AfricInvest, Adelie, and Seedstars Africa Ventures.Ā Ā
ā„Unstoppable Domains has raised $65 million at a $1 billion valuation led by Pantera Capital, Polygon, CoinGecko, and others.
In a twitter post they said This is a huge milestone for NFT domains and further validation for user-owned digital identity.
ā„AI based startup Optic raises $11M to put the āNFā in NFTs
Optic, a startup that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to authenticate non-fungible tokens (NFTs), unveiled its business on Wednesday and raised $11 million in a seed round led by Kleiner Perkins and crypto-native investment giant Pantera Capital. The company will use the funds toward building out the cost-intensive infrastructure and hiring engineering talent
Opticās near-term plans include creating a public API for Web3 developers and new tools for NFT creators and collectors.
ššWEB3 CORNER.
ā„Hashgreed raises $1M+ for NFT and Asset Tokenization expansion in Africa
Hashgreed, an African NFT marketplace, a multipurpose NFT and super dapp platform under the Krosscoin Ecosystem has recently raised $1M+ towards scaling across Nigeria and beyond.
The platform is designed to help both individuals and businesses experience web3 solutions for creative, commerce and Asset tokenization. Hashgreed also hosts amazing DeFi and WorkFi solutions.
Users can create, sell and buy Art NFTs, shop on Hashdealz, its web3 powered eCommerce category, own fractional real estate NFTs, hire and pay freelancers using crypto and stablecoins, save and earn in dollar stablecoin $BUSD and $KUSD, send money to others via African stable coins and much more. Hashgreed makes NFTs accessible to Nigerians via its own naira stable coin called $HASH. They plan to release stable coins of several major African currencies shortly.
āWe believe that Web3 offers far more efficiency, transparency, and security for applications and Kross blockchain will help power numerous web3 solutions in Africa starting with Hashgreed. We invite ambitious projects, developers to build on Kross where transactions are very cheap and fixed and smart contracts are highly secured based on its non-Turing complete programming language and stack.ā, Efosa Ighodaro, Founder and CEO of Vinekross Technology Limited.Ā The funding will enable Vinekross to pursue registration with the Nigeria SEC as it prepares for an ICO event in the coming months.
ā„Cardano Accelerator AdaverseĀ invests in AfriGuilds Mission to onboard Africans into Web3Ā
Adverse, a Cardano ecosystem accelerator set up to encourage the growth of Web3 crypto-native enterprises in Africa, announced its investment into a seed funding round for Afriguild, a blockchain gaming guild-turned DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) providing opportunities for Africans through gaming, education and community building. Adaverse and EMURGO Africa have joined other notable investors in this investment round to speed up Afriguildās mission to onboard 100m Africans into Web3 over the next 5 years.
ā„Jambo Technology is creating a super app to onboard customers in Africa to Web3Ā
Thereās already a strong appetite for web3 in Africa, so itās only natural that crypto will continue to expand within these nations in the form of a fuller web3 experience. This is exactly what Jambo is providing: a āsuperappā with everything a user new to cryptocurrency would need to become integrated into web3.Ā
The first offering the team is planning to launch is Jambo Academy. Jambo Academy will construct an extensive network of ambassadors one city at a timeĀ with a goal of building stronger communities all over Africa. Through these communities, Jambo aims to establish a prominent presence in major population centers to subsequently help expand its reach out to smaller ones.Ā
More importantly, with Jamboās rapidly expanding presence as well as fundamental understanding of cultural nuances, Jambo Academy is developing a web3 curriculum that is both geared towards the younger population and tailored for local cultures.
šBE ON THE KNOWĀ
ā„Tanzanian App, NALA, Partners with Equity Bank Kenya for Remittance Transfers
The partnership will allow Kenyans living in the UK and US to send money directly from their banks through the NALA app to Equity Bank Kenya accounts and other mobile wallets.
ā„safaricom has hired 400 software developers into its workforce as shopify lays off employees.
Ā ā„Stilr, an Egyptian tech marketing startup, is trying to reduce marketing costs by offering a plug-and-play marketing solution to tech firms.
š©āš»TECHNICAL CORNERĀ Ā
Ā A site that visualizes transactions in some of the blockchains like ethereum and bitcoin.Ā
It gives the best analogy of mempool, pending transactions, how transactions are added to a block, how the block is mined and the next one starts being filled with transactions. You can also see how transactions with higher nonce will always sit in the mempool until a transaction with the right nonce is provided.
Its the simplest and the best blockchain visualization tool I have ever seen
Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā From Jay ,Senior DeveloperĀ
šQUOTE OF THE WEEK.
"Testing leads to failure, and failure leads to understanding." - Burt Rutan
Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā
STORY OF THE WEEKšš„
Another week, another month gone and the ngeni fire is still burning hotš„. July has definitely been very intense but it looks like we have made it to the very end. We are stepping into the weekend to battle burnout as we return to the office and kickstart the new month of August.
Fingers crossed itāll be less intense and we shall all make it out alive through the election period. This was the second week of the intense developer sprinting and hackathon challenges. The pressure is still so high but we love it. āNo sweet without sweatāš .
At NGENI, we strongly believe here that the success of the entire group depends on the success of each individual member of the group. This week the developers were challenged to create an Arbitrage bot in a period of three days. Winners of these challenges will be officially announced and recognized next week as NGENIāS Top Developersš and great rewards await. May the best man/lady winš.
Ladies and gentlemen, I hope you now understand why we are East Afrikaās top Developersšš
Remember our new office extension??š, guess what, itās almost fully occupied as we are busy expanding and hiring everyday enabling us to provide more employment opportunities for East Afrikaās sharpest minds. We have successfully hired cohort 10 trainees and theyāll be joining us early next week to kick start their Development journey with the best developer studio in East Afrika.
As we continue building, shaping and moving, we are also creating opportunities for the skilled youths and drastically changing livelihoods of young Africans. I Almost forgot to mention that we have a shifting nature of office space from the HQ to the HQ Extension. This gives everyone an opportunity to change the environment and this could be good for creativity. š
Thatās it from us folks, Catch you next month!
Thanks for readingš
Contact us:Ā NGENI Linktree
Shiko Karanjaā
ABOUT NGENIš„
NGENIĀ is Kenya and East Africa's first pure-play and largest Blockchain & Web3 development engineering Studio with a 50-plus-person team. The studio recruits and trains recent graduates from STEM Universities across Kenya and today has twenty-five (25) talented developers, at our Kilimani Headquarters.
All engineers have successfully taken on complex coding challenges, and hackathons and have ultimately delivered on complex multi-Blockchain applications, bots, and dApps for international projects.