With the turn of blockchain revolutionizing the world of technology, emphasis on its education can’t be over-stretched.
The developed part of the globe has so far maximized blockchain technology, however, the same can’t be said for countries in this part of the sphere.
For Africa to scale beyond its present state, while deploying blockchain technology, there is a need to maximize the biggest use case of blockchain (cryptocurrency) to drive economic changes, thus leading to financial independence.
In a chat with Obinna Iwuno, blockbuild learnt how Crypto Bootcamp is empowering the next generation of African youths.
Obinna is a blockchain educator, advocate, and crypto analyst. He is also a tech enthusiast, who has always been involved in emerging tech trends and how to get the African continent, especially young people to become tech-savvy.
This interest has led him to start the largest blockchain and crypto education training community in Africa, which is known as the Crypto Bootcamp.
Aside from that, he is also the executive secretary of SiBAN (Stakeholders in Blockchain Technology Association of Nigeria), and it is the most active and the largest in Africa, with a lot of partnerships and international collaborations. He is also into business development.
The Crypto Bootcamp
Describing what drove his interest in starting this education platform, Obinna commented that the passion behind the platform is very simple and amazing at the same time, because according to him, he has been in the crypto space for some years as a buyer, buying and selling for profits.
Even at that point, Bitcoin was the only crypto he had explored, owing to its dominance. Unfortunately, this gesture made him lose quite some amount of money, thus, he delved into the world of research about Blockchain and cryptocurrency.
“I started finding a lot of things about this amazing tech, and I started questioning.”, he said.
“If the technology is like this, why are people who have been there not talking about it this way.?”, he continued.
He then decided to make a change about it because blockchain technology is the greatest opportunity that Africa has ever had to level up with the rest of the world.
“And I said, I’m going to let other young Africans know it because I just looked at it as more than just an opportunity to leapfrog”
“You know, it’s a tool for wealth creation and economic development. It is one of the things that we can use to solve the problem of unemployment massively.
Continuing, Obinna said that the Crypto Bootcamp just invited a few people and started as a group on WhatsApp.
He started teaching them about blockchain and cryptocurrency, and soon he invited his colleagues to also teach.
From just a group of one person and the initial 16 people, it grew to over 60 and then 89, until the WhatsApp group was maxed out.
“We had over 200 people, and today the students that we graduated are enthusiasts and big players in the space today.”
According to him, those people are now members of the crypto community.
“And we started opening communities in other locations, in different cities and schools, and before I knew it, the crypto bootcamp, became the largest blockchain community with the largest network in Nigeria and Africa. This has been the journey so far and across the community, we have over 10,000 members”
In his words, the Crypto Bootcamp has educated close to 5000 youths across Africa, and it has been able to achieve the following;
Education
Crypto Bootcamp educative activities have produced enthusiasts, users, customers, advocates, teachers and traders for the space.
“And now we have become the number one recruitment agency for the blockchain and crypto industry in Africa.,
According to him most of these companies or projects always write to the Bootcamp to get a supply of certain skill sets.
“Now, at the crypto Bootcamp, we focus on five major areas. First is blockchain development, because we believe that blockchain development is the core of everything that we are doing with this amazing tech.
Without blockchain development, we will just be speculators of the price of cryptocurrency and traders making money and then nothing really.
However, with Blockchain, we can build solutions that will address Africa’s problems, because blockchain has given man the opportunity to transmit and transfer value, and so we focus on blockchain development because we know that it will help scale the African continent”
Trading and investment
“The crypto market is worth over $2.7 trillion in market capitalization and that’s almost higher than Africa’s entire GDP and that is something significant.
We live in a continent that we are made to believe is poor, however, I will always say that Africa is not poor, what we have in Africa is a man-made poverty, but with cryptocurrency now we can create wealth.
“You know with cryptocurrency, it is possible for the son of nobody to become a wealth creator and job provider, and this we have seen in many young people involved in crypto trading.
So we want every young African to know about crypto trading and investments. Now, I have to say that you don’t have to be a crypto trader, but you must be a crypto investor, because trading is also an activity, if you do not have time for trading then stick to the investment part of cryptocurrency.
That is why we opened a crypto trading arm called CoinZone, specifically dedicated to crypto trading, market analysis and exploring money making opportunities in the crypto industry”
Digital Economy
The crypto Bootcamp according to Obinna also offers training on global digital economy.
“Presently, the world is running a global digital economy, and so, we need to let young Africans and Africans, in general, be aware of the current system of operation in the world.”
“We are operating a global digital economy and for you to be relevant, you must have the digital skills, digital products/assets or a digital platform”
Business Technology
As explained by him, business has moved beyond just theories and curriculum that we are used to years ago.
There is a new form of advancement and innovation in business that has never been seen before, and there is a need to start exploring these things.
One of the things that have struck him the most is the rate at which a lot of tech innovation is going on around the world as people are building solutions that are giving us speed, convenience, empowerment, and rights.
And sometimes you find that most of these things are spearheaded by young people, as most of them are on the technical side with no knowledge of business, business development, or administration.
Explaining further, he stressed that these youths are strictly tech people, who have this amazing innovation, but can’t scale because they lack business knowledge.
Owing to this, Obinna came up with classes for the business side of technology.
“It is one thing to build an amazing tech solution. It is another thing to turn into a business. Having an amazing tech solution and having the business of the tech solution is not the same thing.”
Blockchain and crypto industry training
According to him, the flow of opportunities from January 2009 to February 2021, was 12 years it took the crypto industry to hit $1 trillion market capitalization. However, in less than 90 days, precisely April, it hit another $1 trillion, and in two weeks it added another $400 billion, culminating in a $2.4 trillion market cap.
This simply means that the crypto market has a whole lot of opportunities. “Companies are being built very fast, with new innovations, with these opportunities comes the need for manpower that will be able to service this emerging industry and it is those with the right skills that will take advantage of it.
He further explained that the Crypto Bootcamp decided to focus on training young Africans with blockchain and crypto industry specialized skills, owing to his personal ambition to make Africa the number one exporter of blockchain skills to the world.
Crypto Bootcamp offers corporate training to companies in blockchain and cryptocurrency. Owing to the mass adoption there is a need for inclusive participation to allow Africans to start using crypto while interacting with blockchain technology.
According to Obinna, companies need to start building solutions with blockchain for their business.
“So we offer corporate training, we offer individual training, both online and on -site. So the five areas encapsulate the mission of the Crypto Bootcamp in the blockchain and crypto industry”, He concluded.
Featured Image: Obinna Iwuno, Founder, Crypto Bootcamp
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