Decentralisation is Inclusion: The Evolving Ethereum Ecosystem in Africa
In the past couple of years, major cities across the globe have hosted Ethereum hackathons - ETHCapeTown was definitely unique. The major drive behind such blockchain tech events is often a desire to promote the development of decentralized applications and blockchain-powered solutions across different industries. Through such initiatives, the exploration of a range of potentially commercially viable use cases addressing challenges across a variety of sectors is made possible.
ETHGlobal co-organised the ETHCapeTown event with Linum Labs, a software studio that builds blockchain solutions for the health and identity sectors. Together with a number of sponsors including NuCypher, MakerDAO, Raiden, ENS, Brainbot, Torus, Unicef, and IKU, they hosted an impressive event which showed how dedicated players in the blockchain and cryptocurrency ecosystem are to growing the Ethereum community through the facilitation of such workshops and making educational resources available to enthusiastic developers.
The event which attracted over 190 attendees had some 144 Hackers of which 69% were based in South Africa – a very encouraging signal of potential growth in interest and participation. 42% of the hackers were new to the Ethereum blockchain protocol which can be another indicator of potential growth over the years to come. 15% of the hackers were beginners and around 33 projects were submitted in total. ETHGlobal and their educational mission to push innovations in blockchain shows how inclusive decentralised projects could be. The event appealed to the Ethereum network’s passionate developer community by providing it with numerous tools and support to create a global hackathon network. The top teams at the hackathon were Wildcards, dTok, Sebenzai, and Snap and the sentiment among most of the participants was that these sort of events present opportunities for skills sharpening and allows them opportunities to build new ideas, share knowledge, collaborate and help expand the growing community.
What was most impressive about the approach to fostering innovation was that hackers could work on whatever technical ideas they wished to and the event created an atmosphere where inspired and passionate developers were encouraged to build using the tools available. The mentorship and collaboration provided by the support teams was also great for strengthening the developer community and created touchpoints for possible future collaborations with other teams and mentors across borders.
The effort to push new technologies into the limelight was encouraging and the passionate interest in blockchain-based technologies from the diverse groups that participated was evident, particularly among the local based developers who greatly appreciated the support and encouragement of the broader ecosystem. It is safe to say that progress is surely being made on the African continent in terms of bridging the gap between new technologies and an eager to learn population that hopes to find real solutions to challenges being faced on the continent.
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