Event recap – Blockchain Developer Summit: Nigeria

BSV Blockchain Association and Domineum Blockchain Solutions Ltd. held a successful Developers Summit in Abuja, Nigeria at the start of July, with the summit featuring a variety of presentations from speakers involved with BSV blockchain and the surrounding ecosystem.

The event, which boasted more than 1,500 attendees, featured new product launches, core tech updates, keynote speeches, panel discussions, pitching sessions and fireside chats with global industry leaders.

Below is a short summary of the event and some of the major announcements:

Welcome address – Blockchain Developer Summit: Nigeria

In his welcome address Mohamed Ibrahim Jega, co-founder of Domineum noted that the conference was aimed at finding and developing the ‘next big thing’ with blockchain technology seen as a key enabler.

He added that it was the job of the Nigerian government and BSV to educate the general public about the opportunities in the sector, with several success stories already being showcased.

He added that a large part of BSV adoption in Nigeria was focused on job creation, with the blockchain looking to both skill and employ developers in the country who know how to develop on the blockchain and have actual business use cases.

Day 1 primarily centred on the local tech ecosystem and how blockchain is becoming integrated. Speakers who took to the stage spoke about blockchain’s role in the future of Nigeria and why the ordinary Nigerian should be excited about the direction the country is taking.

The speakers included Yau Garba, the Director of the National Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics; Dr Vincent Olatunji, National Commissioner of the Nigeria Data Protection Bureau; and Professor Umar Garba Danbatta, the Chief Executive Officer of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC).

Education and job opportunities

The potential power of the BSV blockchain as an enabler for both education and job opportunities was again highlighted by the Director-General of National Information Technology Development Agency Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi in his keynote address.

In his presentation, he talked about how blockchain supports digital transformation and is a critical building block of a digital Nigeria. He later commissioned the Baze University AI/Blockchain laboratory.

He added that the Nigerian government has a goal to help educate one million developers in the coming years and that this new laboratory will play a key part in that.

How BSV Blockchain will fundamentally change the music industry

Day two of the event saw three of the BSV ecosystem’s innovators and startup founders take the stage.

In a panel discussion moderated by Domineum’s Mohammed Ibrahim Jega, they discussed how their startups are solving various challenges, leveraging BSV’s massive scaling.

Michal Scilowski, CEO and founder of Soundoshi, said that his company was founded on the basis that streaming services are not the perfect solution for the music industry.

He added that under the current system, both users and artists have very little control over where the money is going as streaming services such as Spotify offer very little insight into how they pay musicians.

By comparison, Soundoshi gives music fans much better control over where their money is going. He added that the platform allows users to pay artists directly for their music or buy NFTs from them. Soundoshi also rewards listeners who like a particular song or artist with its ‘listen-to-earn system’ – an AI algorithm which allows you to be flagged as a super fan when listening to a particular song or artist.

Scilowski said these features are only possible on the BSV Blockchain as it allows for microtransactions at a fraction of a cent with incredibly low data costs.

Creating a super app on the BSV blockchain

Founder of my2cents Dr Maximillian Sinan Korkmaz noted that Nigeria is my2cents’ biggest market, with its young population quick to adopt the latest technology.

Korkmaz said that he created my2cents as existing social media platforms led to growing frustrations and did not meet his standards. He added that the main goal of his platform was to create the opposite of a ‘cancel culture’ platform, with no follower function.

Instead, users are encouraged to read and research posts they would not typically see on other social media platforms. Individuals are exposed to all kinds of ideas and ideologies which is ultimately good for society and avoids segregation, he said.

Korkmaz added that the biggest social media platforms generate most of their money through advertising, taking data and selling it to third parties, meaning users have no real idea of where information is going. He added that my2cents shares its advertising revenue with users with the advertorial process completely transparent.

Why crypto asset market is like the internet in the 1990s

In his presentation, Centbee founder Lorien Gamaroff drew comparisons between the current crypto asset market and the internet scene of the late 1990s. He added that much of the speculation of crypto assets recently has been around buying certain coins which will ‘go to the moon’ and then you can buy a Lamborghini.

However, as thousands of internet startups failed at the turn of the millennia, Gamaroff said blockchain will need stable fundamentals, such as those seen on BSV, to see continued success.

“The most important reason the TCP/IP Internet protocol we have today succeeded is because it was stable. Once the protocol was designed, it was set in stone. That gave businesses confidence that they could now come and build applications on top of that protocol,” Gamaroff stated.

Just like with the TCP/IP protocol, BSV’s protocol is set in stone, and as Gamaroff observed, this gives it the same guiding principles that propelled the Internet to be the critical infrastructure upon which almost everything is built today.

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The Association for the BSV blockchain is the global industry organisation that supports the BSV blockchain. If you would like to attend similar events, head over to our events page to see those planned for your geographic location.