By Sarah Malomo

When Oluwafemi Alofe launched Corpreneur, he aimed to help young Nigerians develop financial discipline. The fintech platform quickly gained traction, amassing over 11,000 users and processing more than $300,000 in savings. But like many early-stage startups, it didn’t survive the pandemic.

That failure didn’t end his entrepreneurial journey — it redirected it.

In 2021, as Nigeria’s inflation rate surged to 15.63% by year’s end, according to the National Bureau of Statistics, Alofe saw a deeper flaw in the traditional savings model. Even though users were saving, they were still losing value at a rate faster than they could earn. Around the same time, a close friend, Paul, struggled for days to send money from Nigeria to his brother in Mauritius; an experience that should have been instant and seamless.

“That’s when it clicked. Stablecoins like USDT could solve both savings protection and cross-border payments. “DeFi had real-world utility, and I knew I had to go deeper.”

Alofe dove headfirst into blockchain, initially self-teaching through open-source codebases and publishing tutorials online. To reinforce his learning and give back, he created Udemy courses that have now impacted over 7,200 students globally.
While developing PiggyFi, a crypto savings and remittance product that later got into the Celo Camp Accelerator, Alofe also worked as a Solidity developer at Protofire.io. There, he focused on Chainlink oracle integrations for new blockchain networks like Celo, helping bring secure data feeds on-chain for decentralized applications. Chainlink oracles are now a cornerstone of DeFi infrastructure, securing billions of dollars by connecting smart contracts with real-world data such as price feeds, weather, and market events.

Despite momentum, PiggyFi ran into a challenge far beyond the tech: Nigeria’s hostile stance toward cryptocurrency.
Struggles with compliance, crypto AML regulations, and remittance restrictions meant that despite grants and ecosystem support, PiggyFi couldn’t scale.

“We hit a wall after winning the grants and preparing to launch. Crypto laws in Nigeria weren’t just unclear, they were stifling. We realized that if we wanted to build freely, we needed to be somewhere that embraced innovation.”

Dubai quickly rose to the top of the list. Just three months after that realization, Alofe made the move. He relocated fully self-sponsored, using the same grant winnings and hackathon prize money to fuel his startup and relocation.

Shortly after landing in Dubai, Alofe’s profile caught a recruiter’s attention from Myco.io, a blockchain-powered streaming platform. Today, he serves as Lead Blockchain Developer at the company, which boasts over 22 million registered users and 7 million monthly active users. Myco has raised over $30 million while hosting 200+ live sporting events, holding thousands of licensed titles, and processing tens of millions of micropayments across its creator ecosystem. In 2024, the company partnered with the Aptos Foundation to scale its Web3 infrastructure, which Alofe also helped lead the integration process.
But Alofe wasn’t done building his product. While working at Myco, he continued experimenting on the side, eventually co-founding SailFish DEX, a decentralized exchange built on EDUCHAIN. SailFish DEX (Decentralized Exchange) quickly became the first native DEX on the chain, redistributing 100% of trading fees to users and providing on-chain governance through its veSAIL model.

Despite being a relatively new entrant, SailFish DEX has already processed over $13 million in transaction volume, bridged more than 1.5 million EDU tokens, and facilitated token launches through its integrated ILO launchpad, ThrustPad. The project has attracted undisclosed backing from the OpenCampus Foundation and Animoca Brands, further validating its market presence.

SailFish isn’t just a DEX; it’s quickly becoming core DeFi infrastructure for EDUCHAIN, powering both AI-driven and DeFi-native dapps. Alofe and his team are positioning SailFish to support a broader decentralized ecosystem, and he has ambitious plans: to scale the platform to $1 billion in cumulative trading volume and $100 million in total value locked (TVL) within the next three years.

Throughout it all, Alofe has remained vocal about the need for more visibility for Black blockchain founders, especially those from Africa. His journey is a testament to what can be achieved through self-teaching, persistence, and building in the open.

“I’ve failed and built, failed and built again. The lesson is always the same: persistence beats perfect conditions.”

From the streets of Ibadan to the tech hubs of Dubai, Alofe’s path wasn’t paved by luck or funding but by resourcefulness and relentless iteration. His story stands as a signal to young African engineers: global success in Web3 is not just possible. It’s within reach.

Malomo, an analyst, wrote in from Lagos