Project GENIUS

Local Challenges, Genius Solutions 🚀✨

[Wada @wada_org]

Presentation from Zaria hub @KaftanDev @_ProjectGENIUS

[Wada @wada_org]

Many meaningful innovations start with limited resources and a strong sense of purpose.

Across Africa, builders continue to show resilience and creativity in the face of challenges.

We’re inspired by the determination we see in communities preparing for CATS 2026.

Follow @cats_summit for more information
#Cardano #CATS26

[Cardano Africa Tech Summit @cats_summit]

Mentor Spotlight: Alfred Itodole

Alfred Itodole is a mentor who isn't interested in Silicon Valley replicas. They are challenging our builders to find the "brilliance in our own struggles."

“It’s time to stop looking West for validation and start building real systems for the common man and woman.”

Hear this perspective at #CATS2026.

[Nathan Nwachuku @_KingNath]

Announcing @terraindustries $11.7M round led by 8VC, the VC by Palantir founder @JTLonsdale

Alex Moore, Board Director at Palantir, also joins Terra’s board

@Max_Sengu & I started Terra to give Africa the technological edge needed for resource protection & counterterrorism
(1/3)

[Cardano Africa Tech Summit @cats_summit]

30 DAYS TO GO!!

The builders are ready.
The ideas are real.
The spotlight is on Africa.

#CATS26 is almost here, where community-built solutions, policy conversations, and real-world blockchain utility converge in Nairobi.

[Wada @wada_org]

The real value of Cardano Africa Tech Summit (CATS) isn’t the agenda,
- It’s the conversations between sessions.
- It’s developers meeting co-founders.
- It’s hubs finding new playbooks.

Wada is here to weave those connections — before, during, and long after Nairobi because ideas grow when people build together.

Follow @cats_summit for more information.

#Cardano #CATS26

[Wada @wada_org]

30 – days to Nairobi.

What Wada is excited about:
✦ Young builders pitching confidently
✦ Meeting hubs we’ve collaborated with online
✦ Africa defining its own tech story
✦ Ideas ready for scale

CATS 2026 is a milestone for African innovation.

Follow @cats_summit for more details.
#Cardano #CATS25

[Project GENIUS @_ProjectGENIUS]

Drum roll… the results are in!!!

After weeks of building, community review, hub-level governance and finally, our hackathon finale, the Project GENIUS CATS Hackathon Hub has officially produced its top teams.
The Projects were assessed based on ground truth, regenerative potential, Cardano integration (tech & narrative), and global readiness.
Here are the Top Teams and their Final Scores
🥇 Team Safro — 432
🥈 Team Kurama — 354
🥉 Team AirChain — 315

These teams stood out for building solutions rooted in real community needs, with clear thinking around impact, scalability, and on-chain alignment.

To every team that participated , thank you. Showing up, building, and submitting is not small work. Each project contributed signal, insight, and learning to this ecosystem, and that matters.

Huge congratulations to our winners and deep respect to every team that showed up and built.

Thank you to @cats_summit and@wada_org & @__prismaevents for being with us and supporting this hub’s journey and making this possible.

[James Dunseith - Andamio @jamesdunseith]

I know where I was on January 6, 2021. I was in a #Cardano Catalyst book club, discussing The Sovereign Individual, when @QuasarSure showed up waving his hands on the video call. "Something is happening" he said, "turn on the news!" We watched together as the events of that day unfolded in Washington, DC.

Project Catalyst (@Catalyst_onX) had launched Fund 1 in the summer of 2020, and I had been working in the Cardano ecosystem for about six months. In those days, book clubs were one of my favorite ways to get to know people. We read about governance, economics, technology, and history. Suddenly, there we were, discussing a book that predicted the collapse of the nation-state, while watching something that looked a bit like that.

The interpretations of January 6 diverge as sharply as the two books I want to talk about today. Some see vindication for those seeking exit from a collapsing state. Others see a warning about what happens when political imagination is captured by myths of grievance.

The Sovereign Individual, published in 1997, told a story about how the information age would erode nation-state power. Cryptography and global networks would make exit viable for those with resources. The elite individual, freed from the demands of redistribution, would flourish across competing jurisdictions. Not everyone would become sovereign, but the talented few would escape the "tyranny of place." Initially dismissed as fringe libertarianism, the book had by the 2020's become foundational in Silicon Valley and the cryptocurrency movement.

Later in 2021, The Dawn of Everything was published. In it, David Graeber and David Wengrow try to dismantle the stories we tell about prehistory and the assumption that humans inevitably progressed from egalitarian bands to hierarchical states. Drawing on archaeological evidence, they show how our ancestors experimented constantly with social arrangements: seasonally shifting between hierarchical and egalitarian modes, building large cities while consciously rejecting centralized power. Their argument is that we have always had political imagination, but that by the 21st century, we had too often forgotten that we possess it.

Both books reject the inevitability of state domination. But where one imagines freedom in escape, the other imagines it in collective creativity. One assumes hierarchy is natural and seeks personal liberation (or at least a safe route to the top); the other argues that we have more options than we think.

In my 5+ years of working in the blockchain industry, I have found so much more motivation in The Dawn of Everything. Some of its archaeological claims have been disputed. Critics argue that the authors cherry-picked evidence and extrapolated too freely from recent ethnography to prehistory. That's fair.

But the core insight sustains my ability to keep working in an industry that makes grand claims but hasn't yet delivered on pushing power to the edges. Human history is longer, more varied, and more creative than we currently acknowledge. It's a theme I return to again and again with friends and collaborators in the Cardano ecosystem.

Decentralized systems, I have learned, are less about revolutions than about reclaiming ancient wisdom.

The Sovereign Individual tells one story, a fear-based tale I have always fundamentally disagreed with: that freedom means needing no one. I believe individual sovereignty is a myth, and a dangerous one. It's another way to position us against each other.

I know that nation states do not always act in the best interests of their subjects. I know that my federal government does not always work in my best interests. But neither does my local government, or Cardano governance, for that matter. That's a feature of governance. I'm not always right. I don't always know what's best. I get closer to the truth by figuring it out with other people. That's why I'll always choose education, creativity, and collaboration over violence as my preferred tools for change.

Why does this matter today? We're entering a new year where the basic definition of what a computer is, where the basic definition of what "information technology" is, are changing dramatically. "Technology" has never been a monolithic thing, and that is more true than ever. It's been true for a long time that we can use technology to create or to consume, and I've come to see the distinction between blockchain and AI through this lens.

AI allows any of us to quickly consume distilled human knowledge. Blockchain allows us, one transaction at a time, to weave a story of individuals working together.

AI amazes us with averages that erase the specific. But it cannot tell you *who* contributed *what*. The individual, who probably worked really hard to make an impact on the world, dissolves into the aggregate. AI is the culmination of Shoshana Zuboff's surveillance capitalism (2019): extraction, prediction, and behavioral modification at scale.

Blockchains preserves particularity. They force us to decide if a transaction is worth signing. Collaboration becomes legible not as aggregate behavior but as specific acts of coordination. Slow consensus, waiting for nodes - and people! - to agree, is not friction to be eliminated but the root of trust itself.

To me, the tragedy is that much of blockchain development has been captured by Sovereign Individual ideology: wealth accumulation, exit, escape. In the last five years, we have struggled to find use cases for blockchain and we've watched AI capture the public imagination. Blockchain has been reduced to "crypto" and "decentralized finance."

That's going to change this year. Those of us who see blockchain differently are not just building ways for more people to trade tokens. We are building systems where working together is tangible.

This is why I build in the Cardano ecosystem, and it's why I am building Andamio. Not because I believe in exit, but because I believe blockchain can be infrastructure for the kind of collective experimentation that The Dawn of Everything suggests.

Cardano has always been a social technology. I have watched it change the lives of people who barely use it, people for whom the blockchain itself is secondary to the relationships, the governance experiments, the communities of practice that have grown up around it. The technology matters, but what matters more is what it makes possible between people. With @andamio_teams, we are building tools that make it more likely that collaboration will take root and thrive. These are not tools for escaping society. They are tools for improving society, together.

Can AI and blockchain work together for broad human flourishing? I fully expect that they will. AI will extend our collective capabilities, and blockchain will be the foundation of collective accountability. We'll have speed where it serves our goals and slowness where the distribution of trust and power matter.

This year, let's keep building infrastructure that treats political imagination as a collective resource to be cultivated, not a constraint to be escaped. The arrangements of power have always been choices. The question I'm asking on this 5th anniversary of whatever happened in D.C. on January 6, 2021, is whether we make them alone or together.

[Project GENIUS @_ProjectGENIUS]

Drum roll… the results are in!!!

After weeks of building, community review, hub-level governance and finally, our hackathon finale, the Project GENIUS CATS Hackathon Hub has officially produced its top teams.
The Projects were assessed based on ground truth, regenerative potential, Cardano integration (tech & narrative), and global readiness.
Here are the Top Teams and their Final Scores
🥇 Team Safro — 432
🥈 Team Kurama — 354
🥉 Team AirChain — 315

These teams stood out for building solutions rooted in real community needs, with clear thinking around impact, scalability, and on-chain alignment.

To every team that participated , thank you. Showing up, building, and submitting is not small work. Each project contributed signal, insight, and learning to this ecosystem, and that matters.

Huge congratulations to our winners and deep respect to every team that showed up and built.

Thank you to @cats_summit and@wada_org & @__prismaevents for being with us and supporting this hub’s journey and making this possible.

[Project GENIUS @_ProjectGENIUS]

Merry Christmas to the minds behind the magic. To the Project GENIUS community, we wish you a very Merry Christmas!🥳🥳

#projectgenius #merrychristmas #complimentsoftheseason

[Grey @jgreyfriend]

In 1983, Steve Jobs predicted the next 50 years of technology.

His predictions:
• iPhone
• Internet
• Softwares
• App stores
• Artificial Intelligence

10 futuristic predictions from this talk that came true:

1. Every major revolution starts ugly

[Project GENIUS @_ProjectGENIUS]

It was electrifying being present at the hackathon. We are still not over it

[Project GENIUS @_ProjectGENIUS]

Zaria showed up. Builders showed up. The community showed up.

On the 18th of December,2025, we all gathered in Zaria for the CATS Hackathon Project GENIUS hub, and what we witnessed reminded us why we do this work.
We watched 15 teams step forward with ideas shaped by lived community needs, ideas they’ve been thinking about, going over with local community members, arguing over amongst themselves, refining to execute potential, and now finally presenting in public. Not just pitches, but projects in motion.

The room was full. Conversations were loud. Learning was constant. From mentors guiding, to founders teaching, to community members listening, asking questions, and holding space, this was collaboration in real time.

This is what we are about. We are about creating rooms where young people can move ideas out of their heads and into the world, with governance, community input, and accountability guiding the process.

With the structures and infrastructure provided through @cats_summit, @wada_org, and @__prismaevents, we were able to host something real, physical, grounded, and deeply human.

No winners have been announced yet. Our community and the hub are still reviewing, engaging, and doing the careful work this stage deserves. What matters right now is that something real has started. Momentum is building. Teams are still refining their ideas. Conversations are continuing. What began at the hackathon didn’t end in the room,it was carrying forward.

This wasn’t a one-day event.
Proof of presence. Proof of capacity. Proof of regenerative beginnings.

[Wada @wada_org]

Happening now: https://t.co/z9pYMw93vd
@cats_summit @CardanoSummit @Cardano_CF @__prismaevents @BCentreNBO

[Jesse Wisdom 🪐 @jesse_Cinnamon7]

Proof that passion travels anywhere, even on a train 🚆😄
Missed the venue, but David & Lukman absolutely nailed our presentation 🙌
Let’s gooo!
@cats_summit @__prismaevents @wada_org @_ProjectGENIUS

[Project GENIUS @_ProjectGENIUS]

CATS Hackathon | Project GENIUS Hub https://t.co/U0BoEzKsL7

[Project GENIUS @_ProjectGENIUS]

CATS Hackathon | Project GENIUS Hub https://t.co/U0BoEzKsL7

[Project GENIUS @_ProjectGENIUS]

Today is the day!

The CATS Hackathon , Project GENIUS hub, goes LIVE & PHYSICAL today.
Real ideas. Real teams. Real community impact.

📍 PG Library, ABU Zaria
🕘 9AM
📡 Streaming live for everyone online

If you’re in Zaria, pull up.
If you’re not, tune in.
You don’t want to miss this. 🔥
@cats_summit @__prismaevents @wada_org

[Project GENIUS @_ProjectGENIUS]

When community, governance, and builders align , Cardano is present.

On December 18th, 2025, the @cats_summit CATS Hackathon Project GENIUS hub goes live, both physically, and online at 9:00 AM at the PG Library, Zaria.

We’ll be watching our teams present ideas, test them, and turn them into real projects shaped by community input and governance.

With the infrastructure and frameworks from @wada_org and @__prismaevents , The CATS Hackathon Project GENIUS hub ,becomes the ground where community ideas are tested in public and shaped in real time.

Come see it happen.
Come support.
Come learn.

👉 Register to attend: https://t.co/c5fb2DYTOE

Make it a date . we have a hackathon to attend this Thursday. 🚀