3 Nigerians clinch $30,000 grand prize in Web3 Mara hackathon

Three team members made up of Nigerians have been recognized as the winners of the 2022 Mara hackathon competition for African Web3 developers.

The developers, Babatide Ayoade, a blockchain developer; Oluwasegun Abisagbo, a frontend developer and Patience Adajah, a frontend d-App engineer skilled in UI/UX design were all part of Team Mastermind, the top team that won the grand prize of $30,000.

The competition was designed to recognize the most viable business proposals with a vision of advancing long-term beneficial, social and environmental change in Africa within the Maasai Mara and beyond.

With a target of providing an achievable means of livelihood for Maasai rangers, conservancies and land owners, team Mastermind set out with a plan to create an impactful USSD blockchain solution in Web3 with non-fungible tokens, NFTs using blockchain to develop a funding solution.

Team Mastermind was part of the top three teams that made it to the finals.

Other teams include - Team Blocverse made up of Toochukwu Okoro, a smart-contract developer; Joshua Avoaja, a software developer with technical implementation skills; and Teresa Amanwachi, a researcher and technical writer. They came second winning $20,000.

The other team, Team AfroLabs also made up of Nigerians, came third winning a prize of $10,000.

The team is made up of Obinna Oba, a full-stack developer with an interest in building in the web3 space for start-ups in Africa; Anthony Nwobodo, a full-stack software engineer and blockchain developer; and Chisom Aniefuna, a 400 level Pharmacy student at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.

The three teams are part of the eight teams that were selected as finalists in August out of over 800 applications by Mara, the Pan-African blockchain platform, to take part in a physical hackathon in the Maasai Mara, Kenya.

Apart from the cash prizes, the winning teams would be eligible to grab other mouth-watering benefits like $100,000 in funding, entry into start-up accelerator programmes, mentorship and other resources to build out their solutions.

This was made possible by the organizer, Mara working in partnership with Circle (the issuer of USD Coin (USDC) and Euro Coin), United Nations Foundations, Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data, Ishara Mara and Antler.