Progress here is shaped not by ease, but by relentless execution, coordination, and the synergy of like minds. It’s this ethos that sets the tone for the story of 2025.
Q1 2025: Dawn
What’s past is prologue.
This quote, attributed to William Shakespeare, best describes why i have to revisit SuperteamNG’s 2024 Impact Report. It provides a reliable starting point for understanding the contrast between 2024 and 2025. From GDP growth to expanded partnerships, community reach, and ecosystem wins, the 2024 report sets the foundation on which the 2025 story is being built, it defines the momentum that carried the ecosystem into the new year.
2024 marked roughly a year since SuperteamNG was born, without any prior blueprint, roadmap, or clear idea of what to do to, first and foremost, survive its infancy. The model it wanted to adopt was new, unfamiliar, and chaotic in the Nigerian crypto space at the time, and efforts to get support from the then gatekeepers of the crypto ecosystem in Nigeria proved futile, as early efforts to collaborate with established ecosystem gatekeepers were unsuccessful; most prioritized budget allocation over genuine community building. Yet, through uncertainty and hostility, the resourcefulness, relentlessness, and hands-on energy of two leaders, Harri Obi and Nzube Ezudo, saw a structure begin to slowly but steadily take shape.
This structure was precisely aligned with one of the eventual core ethos of SuperteamNG: move fast, break things, and just ship it. It was exactly what it needed to be for it to serve as a launchpad for the madness that happened in 2025. But, this early-stage chaos came with another consequence: SuperteamNG’s infancy in 2024 enabled participation-based merits and rewards. In short, the first struggle was getting people to recognize its value, join, stay, and in turn provide value, no matter how little. This made the barrier of entry low, incentives distributed to mere participants, and the focus placed on onboarding numbers rather than onboarding value. A summary of the SuperteamNG 2024 report can be found in this thread.
And thus, as the new year of 2025 began, there was a tunnel-vision focus on aligning incentives, prioritizing quality over quantity, and generating revenue. It all came together under three words — Founders, Tokens, Apps — also called the FAT Thesis. The idea was to increase the quality of builders and reduce friction for ecosystem partners that wanted to expand to Africa, as well as institutions that wanted to work with the Solana community in Nigeria, as reported by SuperteamNG. Q1 2025 was marked by key moments that demonstrated the full effect of this pragmatic shift, and these moments were the inflection point behind SuperteamNG’s immense transformation from a small community to a network state of Solana’s dominance in Nigeria and Africa as a whole. Let’s explore these key moments.
Chomp Partnership + Creator Pilot Program
SuperteamNG partnered with Chomp, thanks to Kryptdou, the Content Guild Lead, which led to the launch of the creator pilot program for Nigerian creators. The stakes included exclusive access to a 9M $BONK prize pool, Chompy plushies, and content challenges, igniting a wave of about 50 creator-led activities never before seen in the community. A new wave of video creators emerged with impressive talent, and this was the moment content reached its tipping point in the SuperteamNG community.
Membership Process Formalization
A clearer, structured path for becoming a SuperteamNG member launched, raising contributor quality and reinforcing community identity from Day 1 of the year. This shifted the community sentiment from “I can’t really say for sure how this works — just contribute and participate” to “you really need to have skin in the game now, fella.”
The On-Ground Acceleration Phase
- First-Ever Founders Dinnerbr>60+ top founders in the Nigerian Solana ecosystem gathered for a day of collaboration, strategy exchanges, product demos, and peer networking, establishing a high-trust founder network aligned with SuperteamNG’s 2025 mission of building an independent and sustainable economy in the region.
- Build Stops Rolled Out Nationwidebr>Local builder nodes activated across Abuja, Imo, and Akwa Ibom, creating weekly co-working and collaboration spaces around the country and aligning with the mission of reducing friction for people who want to build quality products on Solana via SuperteamNG.
- Lagos Community Mixer
The year’s first IRL Lagos event reconnected the ecosystem and amplified early-year community momentum. This was likely the catalyst for the eventual IRL SuperteamNG guild meetups and hangouts across the country. - Startup Village Nigeria
The largest builder convergence in Nigerian Solana history, this was Q1’s heartbeat moment. Startup Village Nigeria brought together over 900 Solana builders, founders, and creators for five days of hands-on workshops, mentoring, product demos, and a regional mini-hackathon, creating a focused environment where real products were pushed forward, new collaborations formed, and SuperteamNG’s builder community once again proved its depth and seriousness at scale. - APEX Cape Town Representationbr>SuperteamNG co-leads hosted Solana’s first major event in South Africa; 25 Nigerian founders/contributors were sponsored, expanding regional influence and reinforcing Africa’s place in the broader Solana network state.
Product-Infrastructure Breakthroughs
- Ribh’sstrong> TVP Surge
Surpassing $3M and then $4.1M in processed volume (while still in beta), this became Q1’s clearest signal that SuperteamNG’s pivot toward revenue-driven products and infrastructure is working. - Verxio’sstrong> Developer Explosion
Over 100 developers installed the API within 24 hours of launch, followed by rapid SDK updates, strong indicators of momentum, usability, and real potential for quality developer-facing infrastructure within the SuperteamNG community.
Q1 Narrative: Economic Liftoff
Q1 marked the moment SuperteamNG shifted from potential to proven economic motion. The data tells the story:
Earnings from bounties followed a steady, reliable growth from $178K → $190.8K → $205K — showing strong demand for Nigerian talent from global projects. Every month, more creators, writers, designers and builders earned more money solving more real problems. This is the clearest evidence that SuperteamNG’s “work-to-earn” philosophy is maturing into a stable economic engine.
The Grants metric tells a different, equally powerful story. January and February were nearly flat, mainly because the process needed a few tweaks and restructuring. But March exploded with a 52% surge, leaping from $134K to $204K. This single jump signals something deeper and structural: the ecosystem is no longer just producing individual contributors, it’s producing fundable projects and scalable products at a pace that external partners and global Solana programs are now confident to bet on.
Hackathons, meanwhile, stayed steady across the quarter. At first glance this looks static — but in context, it reinforces the new years mantra of prioritizing quality over quantity, and it also reveals discipline. Because despite operating Startup Village Nigeria, multiple IRL events, and co-leading APEX Cape Town, hackathon output remained stable. The team didn’t dilute impact, it scaled surface area for participation without sacrificing quality.
As a result, Community GDP climbed from $422,624 in January to $551,000 in March, a 30% rise in just 90 days. This wasn’t driven by one-off wins, but by a consistent, measurable expansion of output across all verticals. The community earned more, shipped more, and created more opportunities month after month.
A subtle but meaningful contributor to this economic lift-off was the decision to support Azza, a WhatsApp-based crypto platform expanding its functionality on Solana. While not a headline event like Startup Village, the Azza integration was a strategically aligned move:
- Its WhatsApp interface provides a familiar entry point for everyday Nigerians.
- It lowers the learning curve for people who want to transact without dealing with technical wallets or unfamiliar product interfaces.
- Within Q1’s broader economic acceleration, it serves as grounded, user-centric infrastructure that widens the funnel for future Solana adoption.
- And most importantly, it demonstrated SuperteamNG’s economy-first, non-tribalist approach during a time of public tension between Solana and Base.
Q1’s intensity illustrated that “growth” alone wasn’t enough for SuperteamNG to reach any reasonable heights. With more builders, more products, more partnerships, more contributors, more members, and more potential revenue channels than ever before, the FAT Thesis (Founders, Apps, Tokens) became more of a sorting mechanism. It clarified priorities, revealed inefficiencies, and forced the ecosystem to evolve from participation-driven to coordination-driven.
As more founders shipped products, more talent earned, and more contributors entered the fold, the old “just participate” model stopped being viable. The system needed structure. And that structure birthed Q2. The ecosystem began operating with intention instead of instinct, becoming a network of products that interacted like an actual ecosystem rather than scattered individual efforts.
Q2 2025: Emergence
Emergence occurs when a complex entity has properties or behaviors that its parts do not have on their own, and emerge only when they interact in a wider whole.
The theme of this section — Emergence — unfolds in a few meaningful directions that fit naturally into the larger SuperteamNG 2025 story. At first glance, emergence is simply about coming into existence or stepping into prominence. But the meaning that matters most here is the one in the quote above: the moment when individual efforts begin interacting, coordinating, reinforcing one another, and producing outcomes that only become possible within a larger whole.
Now, with this backdrop in mind, I’ll explore the key moments of SuperteamNG’s Q2 2025, and highlight the many ways these moments were only possible because of the collective effort and intention of the community. From the outside, it may look like the co-leads, Harri and Nzube, are the ones pulling all the strings. But Q2 reveals, in very provable ways, how none of these milestones could have happened without the distributed force of a community whose individual parts combine to create outcomes far greater than anything they could have produced alone.
Hashed Emergent Report
The first key moment having “Emergent” in its name definitely cannot be a coincidence, right? After the inaugural Text to Code Africa event in Lagos — where SuperteamNG co-lead Harri Obi represented the Solana ecosystem as a panelist — Hashed Emergent launched the first-ever Nigeria Web3 Landscape Report, which revealed two major insights: Solana is the leading chain of choice for Nigerian developers, and SuperteamNG is recognized as the nation’s most active Web3 community, highlighted by its GDP growth and support for local builders and talent. This report makes it easier for capital providers and institutions to benchmark the market, accelerating grant flows, partnership interest, and the overall credibility of Nigerian builders in global conversations.
Local Community Partnerships
Nothing screams maturity and emergence more than local SuperteamNG products collaborating with one another, and the perfect example of this is the partnership between Verxio Protocol and Airbills Pay. Verxio is an on-chain loyalty infrastructure powering growth for consumer apps on Solana, and Airbills Pay is a bill payment platform on Solana that allows users to pay everyday bills with stablecoins like USDC, USDT, and USD*. With the help of Verxio, Airbills Pay introduced on-chain cashback royalties, gamifying everyday spending for users. The practical outcome is higher retention and clearer monetization paths. Payments (Airbills) plus retention (Verxio) equals repeat revenue and product stickiness.
These are two Solana products built by SuperteamNG members, and they collaborated to create something even better for the community — proving that the SuperteamNG ecosystem is becoming so mature that it is evolving into a self-sustaining network that doesn't need external involvement. Harri Obi has often said that one of his goals is to be able to use only SuperteamNG products for his everyday needs, and collaborations like this show that the goal might not be far-fetched after all.
Its also worth mentioning that SuperteamNG partnered with AltSchool, Africa’s leading tech institution, to power the Nigerian track of the Solana Breakout Hackathon on SuperteamEarn, where products from the Enugu, Abuja, and Rivers SuperteamNG chapters emerged as top winners: Verxio Protocol took first place with its loyalty infrastructure built on Metaplex Core, Nectar-Finance secured second place with its stablecoin savings tool for everyday users, and TheJajaProject placed third with Mythic Realms, a game where players battle African myths and level up their heroes on Solana. No other blockchain community has the credibility and excellence to pull this off, and it shows, because this partnership was the first of its kind for AltSchool.
Global Penetration
The final highlight of SuperteamNG’s emergence is its undeniable penetration into the global league of the blockchain and cryptocurrency ecosystem. Several outstanding moments prove this claim, and each one demonstrates how a once-local community is now shaping conversations, competitions, and capital on the world stage.
First, Nigeria ranked #2 globally at the Solana Breakout Hackathon with 175 submissions, a result that reflects not just participation, but the growing sophistication and ambition of Nigerian builders — a global statement. Next, SuperteamNG members pitched their products — ribhfinance and verxioprotocol — directly to Balaji Srinivasan and top venture capitalists in Singapore, placing Nigerian innovation before some of the world’s most influential tech and crypto thinkers. For founders from Africa to command that kind of stage is a clear marker of global emergence.
SuperteamNG’s credibility was further reinforced when Co-lead Nzube Ezudo, alongside Ashley and Alex, was selected as a regional judge for the Devfun World Cup, a developer-focused global tournament. This shows that SuperteamNG is no longer just producing builders, it is producing authorities. Additionally, SuperteamNG builders secured 2 out of the 5 total highly competitive Circle grants, a powerful validation of both the quality of local products and the international trust placed in the ecosystem’s builders.
Finally, Harri Obi spoke on stage at Lagos’ Crypto & DeFi Forum alongside leaders from the SEC, MasterCard, SIBAN, Luno, Roqqu, and others — sharing the blueprint behind SuperteamNG’s success in growing Solana across Africa. His presence in a policy-influential room like this underscores how SuperteamNG’s work is now shaping conversations at both national and global ecosystem levels.
Interestingly, Q2 was also the quarter when SuperteamNG marked its second anniversary, a milestone that aligned naturally with the idea of emergence. By this point, the community had moved beyond a loose collection of early contributors and was becoming an interconnected network where different parts were generating outcomes none could produce alone, and the magnitude of the results validating this shift in operation can be seen in Q3.
Q3 2025: Zenith
Q3 was when results reached their zenith, but it also revealed the depth of effort powering the ecosystem. Gandhi once said that “full effort is full victory,” and the sentiment captures the spirit of this quarter. The community showed up repeatedly, with consistency, discipline, and a commitment to execution, even when results didn’t come immediately.
SuperteamNG entered the Solana Breakout Hackathon with 175 submissions. None secured a win, yet the momentum never dipped. Because the community had already moved beyond seeking validation from hackathon results. By this point, the real measure of progress was the scale and quality of what contributors were building across the ecosystem.
This quarter also revealed something more fundamental, and this is the strength of the network itself. When members faced difficult or tragic moments, support flowed from every layer of the ecosystem. That level of cohesion isn’t something you can manufacture through competition or accolades, it’s built through shared work, trust, and time.
So while Q3 had its share of competitive outcomes, its real significance lies in the collective resilience and output documented in the sections that follow.
Products Hitting New Revenue & Adoption Highs
Several products in the SuperteamNG ecosystem broke past milestones that, taken together, demonstrated sustained adoption, deepening real-world utility and great revenue generating potential. Cryptonia crossed $100,000 in in-app volume, later clearing $250,000 in additional transaction volume, with Solana dominating on-chain activity. Paj Cash also maintained strong momentum, first surpassing $100,000 across more than 5,000 transactions, then climbing to $200,000 and finally crossing the $250,000 mark./p>
On Azza, Solana emerged as the most-used chain, powering more than $246,000 in trading volume and $1.2 million ($1.9 million at the point of this writing) in on-chain volume, and eventually Azza boosted user activity by rolling out a 1.5% cashback reward on all Solana trades. Streamlink hit a major adoption milestone with 10,000 unique (23,477 at the time of this writing) call participants, showcasing how deeply its product has penetrated everyday workflows. And Ribh Finance closed the quarter by growing from $10.5 million in cross-border payments in August to more than $12 million in total throughput by September — expanding its payout support to AED, CAD, and GBP along the way./p>
Revenue milestones validate unit economics and enable reinvestment in growth, developer incentives, and infrastructure. When multiple products hit these markers simultaneously, it signals an ecosystem-wide product-market fit that reduces dependency on external grants.
Product Iteration, Feature Releases & Early Traction
Q3 was also marked by constant iteration and product evolution. HeySolana shipped major usability updates, including widgets and a Bluetooth mode designed for users on the move. Udoka, a SuperteamNG member, hosted the first Magic Block Developer Meetup in Lagos, strengthening the builder pipeline and deepening SuperteamNG’s influence in shaping the next generation of Web3 developers. Fiat Router announced “The Inception,” its first-ever product event set to debut its agentic ICM trading system. On the gaming front, Jaja Playtest 2.0 opened early playtesting to the Web3 gaming community, while titles from Thejajaproject, itsjujugames, and Rust_undead — the latter having recently secured a sizable Solana Foundation grant that underscores the quality of Nigerian Solana builders, took center stage at Nerdwork Comic Con 2025, giving attendees a glimpse into the future of on-chain gaming.
Bounty Wins, Talent Velocity & Community Earnings
Q3 also reflected the raw competitiveness and talent density of the ecosystem. Tsmboa and Kinemcodes secured 1st and 3rd place respectively in the LayerZero_Core bounty, earning a combined $12,500. SuperteamNG launched $25,000 in new bounties across development, design, writing, animation, and content creation — further broadening the opportunity surface for contributors.
In August, the community crossed $1 million in cumulative earnings, solidifying its position as one of the most productive ecosystems globally. And Cryptooracle, one of the standout contributors, was spotlighted for ranking among the top 50 globally on Superteam Earn, having earned $14,000 in a single year.