The technology was not the problem.

For Peter Otobong and his team at Fraqtion Finance, the idea was simple enough: allow people to pool money to finance real-world trade, such as a Chinese company buying lithium from Nigeria. The software could be built. The architecture could be designed. The engineers could make the system work.

But then came the questions that code could not answer.

Who would license it? Who would regulate it? Where would the capital come from? Which financial institutions would support it? And how would the technology fit into the systems that already governed the movement of money and commodities across borders?

The project never launched.

For Otobong, however, its failure became one of the most important lessons of his career.

“The biggest constraints are not necessarily technical. The biggest constraints are normally the systems in which the technology is going to operate in,” he says.

It was a lesson that would change the way he looked at his profession. Technology, he began to understand, does not exist in isolation. A piece of software may work perfectly and still fail if the business around it is wrong, if regulation does not permit it, if institutions cannot support it or if the people it was built for cannot use it.

For someone who had once dreamed of becoming a mad scientist, it was an important realisation.

As a boy, Otobong had imagined science as an almost limitless frontier. He wanted to build things, explore strange possibilities and push beyond what was already known.

“A scientist who is doing a lot of stuff, like going to space, trying to imitate aliens,” he says, recalling the kind of scientist he wanted to become.

The inspiration came largely from the cartoons and animations he watched growing up. They gave him a world in which imagination was not constrained by what was immediately possible.

Years later, that instinct to build remains. But the problems Otobong is interested in have become more complicated.

He is no longer simply asking whether something can be built.

He wants to know whether it can survive the world around it.

And that distinction has taken him from tinkering with computers as a child to writing software, building blockchain systems, developing communities of African technologists and working on financial infrastructure for businesses moving money across borders.

Finding a path into tech

The computer laboratory at his primary school was supposed to teach Otobong how to use a computer. Instead, it left him wondering how the machine itself worked.

In Primary Four, his school began taking students to the laboratory to learn basic applications such as Microsoft Word and Excel. While other pupils were learning how to use the programmes, Otobong found himself more interested in what was happening beneath the screen.

“That was where my interests in computers really grew,” he says. “It was my first physical interaction with this imagination I’ve always had to become sort of a mad scientist.”

The laptop that would finally give that curiosity somewhere to go came years later.

In 2014, an uncle gave him one, and for the first time, Otobong had a computer he could explore on his own. He began teaching himself how to code, moving from curiosity about computers to actually building things with them.

“2014 was when I actually started getting my hands dirty with C++ and writing code and also getting introduced to how to design web applications,” he says.

Yet even then, software engineering did not feel like a career to him.

He had grown up in an environment where the profession was barely visible. The people around him followed careers he could easily name: government work, accounting, engineering and jobs in the oil industry. Software was something he enjoyed experimenting with, but he had never seen anyone close to him turn that interest into a profession.

“I grew up in an environment where it was very strange to say somebody’s a software engineer,” he says. “I don’t have any relative or friend who was into IT.”

So, when the time came to choose a university course in 2015, Otobong did what many young Nigerians do when the path ahead is still unclear: he followed a familiar route that still left room for his curiosity.

A family friend introduced him to electrical and electronics engineering at the University of Port Harcourt, Rivers State in Southern Nigeria. The course offered a bridge between the physical systems that fascinated him and the computers he had begun teaching himself to understand.

For the next five years, he studied the discipline. But it was outside the classroom, during an internship, that Otobong would begin to understand where he truly belonged.

From hardware to software

In 2019, Otobong interned at Atopets Automation, a robotics and automation company in Port Harcourt. He worked with microcontrollers, Arduino boards, ESPs and Raspberry Pi, building systems that could respond to the physical world.

But he found himself increasingly drawn to the software behind the hardware.

“I discovered that I love the hardware, but I also love the process of writing software to make the hardware work,” he says.

That realisation pushed him deeper into software and shaped his final-year project: a facial-recognition system that could identify authorised users and control access to a smart door.

Then, in 2020, he was selected as a Google Student Developer Lead at the University of Port Harcourt. The programme exposed him to developers across Africa and, for the first time, showed him that software engineering could be a viable career.

“I got to see people who were in the software field as a full-time career, and they were doing well,” he says. “And so it just changed something in my mind because I can now see that I can actually build a career out of this.”

From building systems to building communities

After graduating in 2021, Otobong’s first professional break came at the African Blockchain Centre for Developers (ABCD). A friend had told him about a blockchain training programme, and he applied, initially expecting to learn alongside other young developers.

He was selected as one of the first 14 people in the cohort. But ABCD soon realised that Otobong was bringing more to the programme than a willingness to learn. He already had experience with technology and, importantly, with bringing people together around it.

“They reached out and asked if I wanted to join the team, not just to learn about blockchain, but to work on the technical side and with other developers.”

The invitation marked a subtle shift in his career. Otobong entered ABCD as a learner but soon found himself on the other side of the learning process, working as a technical and developer advocate.

At first, his work centred on understanding blockchain technologies such as Ethereum and helping others make sense of a field that was still unfamiliar to many developers in Nigeria. But as ABCD’s work evolved from training and advocacy to building software and tools for clients in the blockchain space, so did Otobong’s responsibilities.

He began working with organisations to define what they needed, translate those needs into technical requirements and scope projects. He also helped vet developers, write code and coordinate technical teams.

The progression was gradual, but significant. He was no longer simply learning how technology worked; he was learning how to make it work for other people.

Eventually, Otobong grew into a technical lead role, taking greater responsibility for technical delivery while helping organisations find, evaluate and manage the developers who would build their products.

It was around this time that another idea began taking shape in his mind: technology was not only about the things you built. It was also about the people and communities that made building possible.

Building a community