DEVHUB’S IMPACT: SHAPING THE FUTURE OF WEB3 AT ETHACCRA
Empowering the African Web3 Community
Held from September 7th to 9th at the University of Legon in Ghana, ETHAccra 2023 saw DevHub collaborate with NEAR Africa to introduce developers to the Blockchain Operating System (BOS).
As we reflect on this remarkable experience, we’re excited to share highlights of our ETHAccra experience, efforts we made, and our future prospects.
Building Solutions for Africa IRL
While ETHAccra initially focused on building technical projects like wallets and privacy solutions, it eventually shifted its attention to practical community-driven ideas. These projects aimed to solve everyday problems for local communities.
For instance, ‘Borla2Earn’ encouraged people to collect trash in exchange for rewards, making waste management a community effort.
‘Eaze’ allowed users to make blockchain transactions without the internet, making it accessible to more people through a simple USSD code.
And ‘Donorsynk’ tackled Africa’s blood donor shortage by rewarding donors with tokens that could be used for health checkups and recognition.
However, we believe these solutions merely scratch the surface of their potential and we aim to change that by making these developers part of a global movement that values decentralization, ownership, and innovation.
Why Building on the BOS Matters
BOS is both a development environment and a social network where users can deploy and discover new applications. It simplifies building Web3 applications by providing easy onboarding and high security.
As Africa rapidly embraces digital solutions, the B.O.S brings developers a unique opportunity to create solutions that can seamlessly interact with global blockchain networks, opening up opportunities for cross-border trade, money transfers, and more.
We met alot of random people who turned out to be extremely interesting people and skilled blockchain developers. They were excited to sign up for the BOS workshop led by DevHub DevRel (Victor Kanu), who was aiming to contribute to blockchain education at ETHAccra and hopefully start a community of BOS Builders.
Well then…How did it go?
Empowering Developers with the BOS
The workshop, ‘Building Decentralised Frontends’, kicked off with an introduction to the NEAR Ecosystem. All 40 developers in attendance were guided through setting up their NEAR Wallet on Meteor. Subsequently, we introduced B.O.S, emphasizing the persistent challenges in building decentralized applications today. These challenges include data storage on web2 centralized servers and the fragmented nature of web3 technologies. B.O.S was presented as the solution to this problem, offering a unified platform for all open web experiences.
Developers were excited to learn about the social network on the BOS and were guided through setting up their NEAR Social profiles. We later dove into the composability of the BOS and some coding exercises—where developers learnt how to fork components and make changes of their choice.
We encouraged developers to actively participate in DevHub office hours (Link can be found below the article) and established the BOS Builders Telegram group chat to facilitate ongoing connections for future events and projects.
We also had testimonials like this:
Developers found navigating NEAR (BOS) easy, and they showed enthusiasm for creative project ideas on the BOS We engaged in conversations with the hackathon winners, ‘Donorsynk’, discussing how they can bring their project to the BOS. Currently, we are guiding them in setting up their local BOS environment and providing additional resources.
The Future: WebFusion Hackathon
To follow up on our recent efforts , We are thrilled to announce the upcoming ‘WebFusion’ hackathon brought to you by DevHub — a Web2 to Web3 IRL Hackathon in lagos Nigeria — all about building on the B.O.S.
The NEAR (BOS) Virtual Machine, runs on JSX, a framework reminiscent of React. This serves as an accessible gateway for Web2 developers to finally transition into web3.
What makes WebFusion particularly exciting is our community partnership with ALX, Africa’s largest developer community. ALX is a well-established network of Web2 developers, and WebFusion will leverage this network while also extending a warm welcome to developers outside of ALX.
Our primary Objective with WebFusion is to empower developers to create products and solutions with real-world applications, develop innovative features on the B.O.S, and migrate their Web2 concepts into the decentralized space.
Moreover, we see WebFusion going beyond just project development, it’s about gaining insights into how the BOS can be improved. Builders will become mentors, and we envision a series of events following a similar approach, possibly on a monthly basis (e.g WebFusion2). This approach fosters more developer engagement, more coding, and a better Blockchain Operating System.
Conclusion
Overall, ETHAccra was great, but there were a few minor issues that we encountered. One of the challenges we faced was with the WiFi connectivity, as there were so many participants using their mobile devices and laptops at the same time, which made it difficult for the network to keep up. Despite this setback, The workshop was a huge success, questions were answered, and the newly developed community was vibrant.
Written by Victor Chima-Kanu
Stay Connected
If you’re new to the BOS, we invite you to check out our wonderful documentation: BOS Documentation
You can engage and learn more with the NEAR DevHub communities at:
DevHub | DevHub Discord | DevHub Office Hours |
Connect with NEAR Africa: Telegram
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About NEAR (BOS)
NEAR is on a mission to onboard a billion users to the limitless possibilities of Web3 with the Blockchain Operating System (BOS). Leveraging its high-performance, carbon-neutral protocol, which is swift, secure, and scalable, NEAR offers a common layer for browsing and discovering the Open Web.
