Communities within ecosystems are a dime a dozen. Right? Right. So many blockchain communities exist today, and pop-up events in the blockchain space are gradually gaining popularity. Right? Right again.
Communities are good for networking and education, but they don’t exactly drive the growth of the ecosystem—they’re usually just a result of it. Right? Wrong!
This entire piece is about how one blockchain pop-up event in Accra has quietly, but powerfully, boosted the growth of the blockchain ecosystem.
Here’s the story;
In 2024, a blockchain popup city happened in Accra, Ghana – muAccra. muAccra was a 2-week developer gathering, aimed at igniting the growth of the African blockchain developer ecosystem. But we’ve heard this before, haven’t we? The tech industry is rife with conferences, communities, bootcamps and more programs all aimed at expanding the ecosystem. However, it can be a little tricky to see how this impact is actually achieved in real life, and that’s what this story is about.
Like many of such events, muAccra featured workshops, presentations, bootcamps for developers, speakers both local and global, and a Hackathon. Like many of such events, participants met with other participants with shared interests and formed connections. We’re following one of such connections.
Andrew Miracle, Mercy Thaddeus and Joshua Omobola met at muAccra, 3 out of 100+ developers who were accepted in a cohort of blockchain developers, builders, writers, content creators and enthusiasts. They met and discovered that they shared interests and purposes: Andrew works in AI/ML and Data engineering; Joshua works in DevRel and software development; Mercy is a frontend engineer. If this piece stopped here, you’d think “well, there’s nothing special about that” and you’d be right. Connections like this happen at every conference in the industry.
However, this trio has transformed their connection at M.U Accra into groundbreaking projects that are driving blockchain adoption across ecosystems.
Andrew, from his experience, contributing to The Remix, the Opensource editor for solidity smart contracts joined a team building from scratch for smart contracts. Their V1 called Cairoblocks has received a $25k grant from the Starknet Foundation team, and they are also looking to expand to other smart contract languages like Solidity, Move and Soroban.
Joshua has partnered with MODE blockchain to build an interactive onboarding tool for experiences, that can be used to unlock blockchain and crypto experiences at events, hackathons and also drive engagement for new products like staking, pools, liquidity instead of static explainers and twitter threads.
Mercy launched an initiative that taught tech skills to over 1,000 students across half a dozen schools in 3 Nigerian cities. Her impactful work earned her a sponsored flight to Bangkok, Thailand, as a Volunteer for the Ethereum Foundation’s DevCon event.
The 3 of them, together, have built Soroban by Examples, which is a playground for smart contract developers new to the stellar blockchain to learn a new smart contract language. This project won a $13,000 award and a sponsored trip to London for the Stellar Meridian 2024 conference
These projects, as well as the products they’re still ideating and developing, make a real difference to the growth of the ecosystem.
Each of these guys have expressed certainty that they may never have embarked on these projects if they didn’t get talking at the muAccra pop up city event.
Here’s the story, from one of the 3, Andrew Miracle;
“I had wanted for so long to learn about Rust VMs and take my knowledge beyond just the EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machines). In the past years, a lot of Rust VMs have gained popularity and starting gaining mass adoption with a number of them including ‘Solana’, ‘Stellar’, ‘Starknet’ and during this sponsored Popup city event, there was a dedicated Starknet Bootcamp for developers to learn how to write smart contracts with Cairo, and there was no better way to fast track learning a new language, other than doing it in person with the experts right there on ground with you.
This was the perfect opportunity, because it’d be rare to have something like this, where the pioneers of a language or protocol would spend time in person with you in such an immersive manner; they’d have breakfast, lunch and dinner with you, and beyond just the classes, you can have those aside conversations where knowledge can be passed down from person to person in the most informal way, but immersive and engaging.
Mercy and I were in the same hackathon team, working on a zk (Zero Knowledge) Identity solution called Zeek. However, 2 days to the final submission of the hackathon, we didn’t have a designer and the deadline for submission was looming.
This was when we found Joshua, who was like this excellent hidden gem, that just stayed in his room, in true hidden gem fashion.
He had been there the whole 2 weeks, attending the event, creating content, even made a snapchat filter and shared little hacks, like the closest restaurants where you could dine in native nigerian delicacies or just tweets/reels about the event. But many didn’t know who Joshua was in-person. This you could primarily attribute to the anon nature of crypto enthusiasts who simply attribute to each other as fren.
Joshua joined our team and in less than 24 hours on emergency mode, and we had a badass UI that needed to be implemented for our solution, while I focused on the zk circuit integration for our identity pass idea.
I still remember Mercy on the dining table of ‘Rose House’, writing finishing touches for the UI components and elements, while Joshua assisted with exporting UI elements and integrating the code after he was done serving UI.
I know I muttered something in that dining room to the tune of, ‘I’m definitely sure I’ll enjoy working with you guys.’
From the way we interacted and flowed, I was certain that this wasn’t the only project we would work on together.
Our Hackathon project didn’t win first prize; however, we won Best UX for a crypto app. Anyone would have considered that the end, but this was only just the beginning of our journey.
I achieved my aim of getting to learn all about Cairo, the smart contract language for Starknet and was able to build two projects during the time I was at the camp. The first project was an adaptation of the CairoVM to be used as the foundation for a Block based programming interface, I used to do this before as a contributor to RemixIDE, The most popular IDE for Ethereum and Solidity developers, so I took from that experience to port the same existing functionality into a block-based interface for Cairo, which is similar to the MIT scratch project. This should be enough of a testimonial for a popup city event, but an important connection came out of it; a connection that has provided opportunities for innovation.
For the hackathon, I built Zeek with Joshua and Mercy who are both amazing people, and our journey didn’t stop there. MuAccra was just the beginning. Since the pop-up event, we have done much more.”
This is an amazing example of the role of communities as drivers in the growth of ecosystems, no matter how niche. Events like the muAccra popup event create communities; these communities foster meaningful and strategic connections among players in the industry; those connections trigger ideas; those ideas drive rapid growth in the ecosystem, bringing groundbreaking innovation closer and closer.
Popup city events are still considerably new, but they are gaining popularity gradually, with events like ETHiopia being one of the first in 2025.
For developers, pop-up events like M.U Accra are more than networking opportunities—they’re gateways to innovation and collaboration that transcend borders. So, consider this your sign to seek them out and make the most of the experience. For stakeholders, supporting these initiatives could unlock Africa’s immense talent pool, pushing blockchain technology to new heights.
All it takes is the right environment to spark groundbreaking ideas, so let’s go ahead and create them.
