Projects
![]()
No projects found
Investors
New
DAO Treasuries
DATs
Lend / Borrow APRs
Chains
Categories
Spaces
Community Update - Harbinger Focus
Recorded: Aug. 15, 2025 Duration: 0:31:49Space Recording
Short Summary
In a recent discussion, Barnabas from Ontology Africa shared insights on the rapid growth of the African community's engagement with blockchain technology, particularly in fintech. He emphasized the importance of strategic partnerships, such as with Flutter Waves, to enhance trust and financial inclusion, while also outlining plans to educate the next generation through university collaborations.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. TMGM, I'm just going to do a quick tech check before we kick off.
Barnabas, can you hear me okay?
Okay, we'll try this again, GM, GM.
I just want to do a quick tech check before we kick off just to make sure that everybody
can hear me okay.
We have Barnabas, one of our ontology harbingers joining us this morning.
So Barnabas, can you hear me okay?
I just want to double check that we can hear you as well. We'll do another quick tech check. I'm not sure if everyone can hear me. Always some type of technical issues when it comes
to spaces unfortunately. Seems to have a big issue with me over the last few weeks. Barnabas,
hello. I just want to do a quick tech check. Make sure you can hear me and I can hear you okay.
Yeah, can you hear me?
I can now, yeah. Okay, awesome. Let's kick off in one minute. We'll see if we can get some more folks to roll on in.
Okay. Thank you. Okay, cool. Let's kick things off. GMGM, hello all Antonauts. Happy Friday to everyone.
Appreciate so many of you joining in this morning. Well, morning for my time,
evening, afternoon, maybe for a lot of other folks. But I'm really excited for our spaces today.
As you know, we're always trying to invite different folks onto the spaces to get like a
broader sense of what's happening in the community, you know, rather than me just kind of always
giving you guys updates, kind of specifically coming from Ontology. So today we have Barnabas, one of our harbingers,
who's running the Ontology Africa on X as well.
Yeah, so Barnabas has been really busy
and we're seeing such a fantastic growth
within the African community when it comes to kind of Ontology.
So I'm really excited to hear more from Barnabas
and yeah, how everything's been developing.
Barnabas, do you want to give everybody just a
quick intro to yourself and then we'll just jump straight into all the questions?
Yeah, GM, GM everybody. It's nice to be here. My name is Barnabas and then I'm from Nigeria.
I have been at Ontology Network.
at Ontology Network.
Great, so everybody knows my typical structure when it comes to these calls.
We usually have about 30 minutes and then we have a bunch of different questions
so that we can get to know the other person.
So Barnabas, thank you so much again for joining the call.
So I'd love to know a little bit more about you and maybe about your background
and your introduction into Web3 and Ontology.
Yeah, okay. So I got into Web3 2020 during the COVID lockdown. I was introduced by,
like it was introduced to me by a friend. He was just telling me, okay, this is an awesome
He was just telling me, okay, this is an awesome technology, that's Web3, and this is what you can do with it.
And if you want to venture into it, you can learn their programming language because I studied computer science and engineering.
So it was an easy decision for me to make.
I kind of like just went straight to it.
And during my final year, my thesis was based on blockchain.
So it was a project that will give rural communities access to healthcare
using a tokenization method where if they don't have like insurance,
they will get to pay based on the service
being rendered to them. So let's say you went to the hospital or clinic and then you were
treated based on, let's say you have a headache and that's the only payment you are going to
make for that particular service. Even though you don't have any insurance, you don't have any insurance you you get to to pay you don't have to pay for that that
much and we we partnered with some clinics and then some patients to test the the thesis and
it's it's worked so I think that there are some Indians here so I I studied in India yeah so that
was and the the reason why I went into blockchain.
It was a fascinating experience.
I kind of love it.
That's such an interesting background, Barnabas, actually,
because I think especially if you're coming from a background,
like you said, computer science,
so you're obviously quite familiar with emerging tech.
So I think to make the next step into Web3
probably doesn't seem as daunting maybe to some folks who aren't as familiar. And I think your focus on healthcare is super admirable and
also something really interesting we can continue. Maybe I can learn a little bit more about that
after the call, but we do talk about healthcare quite a lot within Ontology just around
decentralized identity and the potential for kind of folks owning their data specifically when it comes to healthcare. So that is super interesting. So just to kind of continue going,
because I get distracted quite easily. That's why I always have specific questions. So it's
really great to learn more about your background. Obviously, it sounds like it was an easier
transition for you to kind of make into Web3. But let's learn a little bit more about why Ontology and I guess specifically
around the Harbinger program too.
Yeah, so I was drawn out to Ontology because of its focus on solving real world
identity and trust issues.
That's yeah, it's kind of like, let's say it's a personal thing because this,
let's say it's a personal thing because my bro was scammed by a company that claimed to be
another company. So it was more of a like, okay, what should I do? Where can I get something that
will prevent such things from happening? So that was why I started my research and then I got drawn to ontology and then I said let me join and help in
any way I can. Unfortunately within this space scamming stories are all too common. It's happened
to me, I think it's happened to nearly everybody I've ever met that's like I act over working in
this space so that is really unfortunate but But you know what, I would have to
say that I totally understand your reasons for joining Ontology. Like I joined Ontology as the
Ontology team only two years ago. Definitely was really attracted again, very same reasons you were.
Also loved the structure of the team. So that's great to hear that you're kind of joining to
solve a problem and that you found that Ontology Solutions made sense for that.
So I've seen a lot of activity on X.
I know you work quite closely with the rest of the Harbingers
and also with Jeff, and you've been very active with Humpty as well
when it comes to spaces.
So I would love to know a little bit more
because you've obviously got your finger on the pulse
of the Nigerian community and also the broader African community as well.
I know there was an awesome the broader African community as well.
I know there was an awesome space hosted last week as well. I'd recommend all folks to go and join in on that. Jeff was there too. But yeah, what excites you the most about kind of
bringing Ontology or some of the Ontology products kind of to your community?
Okay, for me, I would say the opportunity to restore trust and create genuine economic opportunities.
Nigeria has a reputation, you know, that has been unfairly damaged by a lot of people.
We have that kind of, like, notion around us.
If you say you are from Nigeria or you're from Africa, people tend to look at you with some kind of, like,
people tend to look at you with some kind of like,
I don't know whether I should say it's a stereotype,
but they don't trust you fully.
But that's like, for me,
I want to create that opportunity and restore that trust
so that when individuals or business are communicating
or trying to achieve something,
the trust should be there.
So that's, I think, for me, the reason why I want to introduce Ontology
to help honest Nigerian entrepreneurs prove their credibility
and build the trust they deserve in global markets.
Yeah, that's a solid reason, Barnabas.
I hope, and also just on that, I hope you're getting the support that you need
in order to do this.
I know Jeff, as I said, has been supporting has been supporting you and I know even working with himself and I'm hoping to
kind of spread that message a little bit more so I hope Ontology can continue to kind of support you
and anything that you need I know you and I it's the first time we've connected on one of these
spaces so obviously it won't be the last but we're kind of starting at the very beginning to kind of
just to get to know you and hopefully introduce you to other community members that joined the earlier call.
So I really appreciate kind of all the answers that you're giving this morning.
So let's dive a little bit deeper into the Nigerian community.
So, you know, are there any trends that you see or maybe any other types of communities that Ontology could potentially target or support
or even collaborate with, with everything that's going on?
Do you think there's like a different direction that Ontology should go in
or are there trends that we should be more aware of?
So I think the trend that is currently booming here in Nigeria is the fintech sector.
While the agricultural sector doesn't embrace technology yet, but the fintech sector, I think, really benefits with what Ontology
is doing. But in terms of collaboration, right, we can collaborate with other Web3 or blockchain
communities and spread awareness on what ontology
can do we definitely we are going to onboard more people into the community that will come
and build that will come and and just help us in in any way they can
definitely i think um over the last few years since i've been on the team we've we've definitely
seen a shift with ontology's focus to like not be building, but to kind of, I guess, work on communication and to further develop our ecosystem.
So we're definitely really committed into community engagement and open to a bunch of different activities that help to support that.
So if anybody's listening now or that gets the chance to tune in later, exactly what Barnabas has said, that if there's anybody that would like to collaborate, then we're super open to do that.
I generally lead most campaigns, so feel free to reach out to myself or Jeff and we can hopefully support on that.
So Barnabas, I know you've been super busy.
I can see what you've been working on.
But do you have any other plans to kind of grow awareness around ontology?
I know you're really interested in writing content.
And as I've said that you've been kind of active on spaces.
I'm not sure how much more you could do, but maybe you have other plans or other ideas that you'd like to share with us today.
Yeah, you know, this whole community building is new to me.
I'm a developer by profession,
but when I started building the community,
I had no idea,
but with the help of others,
definitely I was able to achieve what I've achieved so far.
So going forward,
I think we are talking with so many universities.
We want to partner with the community computer department and create
that committee the other university community hub for students that will be some will be leaving
college some are still there so we want to create awareness about blockchain about ontology so that
when they are done or when they're still in school they they will be part of the community, and then maybe build something or contribute in any way.
So those are, I think, the areas we want to focus on,
and also partner with some business,
how to help them integrate onslogging or any ontology infrastructure
into their already made products.
I love this. I love the focus on universities or colleges to kind of get that connection early.
It's really about kind of removing barriers for entry. So if we start communicating with students
like in an earlier stage, I think it becomes less difficult for them to join a community
and then they can get access to ontology resources as they start to develop.
And honestly, we create like a funnel for ontology for potential developers and for
developing the community.
So I love this idea.
I think it's fantastic.
And I understand the issues around community building.
Like I've been on the ontology team for two years, but I've been in this space since like
2017 and working between marketing and growth a little bit longer than that so community building is difficult but it's
so necessary especially in this space I think I've said before like companies live or die by their
communities in this space I mean they're folks that use our products they give us feedback they
spread the word they're like not they're like a different marketing tool for communication.
So communities are so important.
And that's why from my side, looking at what you've achieved so far, it's extremely impressive.
So hopefully we can continue to support you with that as well.
So just, again, just kind of staying within kind of the focus on your community.
How would you, I guess, talk about ontology or what would you say about ontology to anybody that's new to it from your community. How would you, I guess, talk about Ontology or what would you say about Ontology to
anybody that's new to it from your community or that wanted to get involved? We can keep this
really open. I mean, you can consider products or even just join in the community. So yes,
it's super open. But yeah, what would you say to someone in your community that might just be hearing about ontology for the first
time? Okay, so when I first started building the whole community, I used like people's experience,
you know, a lot of Ponzi's came into Nigeria, scammed a lot of people, so I kind of use that personal experience in order to create that awareness, educate them about, okay, if we have something that will prevent such things that's happened, this is the way, right?
I will start by saying ontology is like having an unhackable digital ID that proves who you are and what you do.
Think of it as protection against the scams that
hurts so many families here.
Instead of trusting empty promises of impossible returns
because some people put a whole lot of money
into those platforms thinking they are going to make it big.
And then I would tell them you can verify everything.
Everything is verifiable.
And once you have your aunt's ID, it also helps legitimate business proof who they are and their credibility.
So that's like how I get to educate people.
And then they will be intrigued and will get on board.
intrigued and will get on board.
I mean, it's definitely not great to have to use kind of people's experiences
of being scammed in the past.
But whether I know it's your own experience within a certain community
or just this space in general, it is a good kind of starting point
to kind of get the conversation going and to let people know that,
look, you don't want this to happen again.
Check out what Ontology has to offer.
So I think it allows people to understand it a little bit better,
kind of removing a lot of kind of technical jargon as well.
So it definitely sounds like it's a great way to go.
And I know you've been educating a bunch of folks already,
so it's obviously working.
But just to get a little bit more into maybe products or tools when it comes to Ontology,
is there anything that you're using right now?
I know you've mentioned Ont ID so I'm going to assume we'll talk about Ont ID,
but maybe an Ontology product that you think maybe stands out or maybe it might be one of your favorites.
or maybe it might be one of your favorites.
I would say the new feature on Orange Protocol
with the CEX, I think, is it human verification?
Yeah, nice.
I was very wrong.
That's okay.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So you get to create that human protocol,
or should I say like a human score with your CEX.
And that does like your data, your information is secured
because they use ZKTLS for that.
And all your data,
because you've obviously done KYC in that CEXO,
all your data is safe, secure, and then you are verifiable.
So that's like what I was looking into.
And when it came out, I was really happy.
I was able to connect my Binance, my Bybit, and the rest.
Yeah.
Great, Barnabas.
Thank you so much for that.
I appreciate that because I think maybe sometimes it's not as clear to folks that Orange is part of ontology. We had Dave on last week, the kind of CMO, pretty much you know he's very
active across the board within Orange but he was kind of doing a deep dive into ZKTLS as you've
just mentioned and we were chatting about case studies so it's interesting to hear that that's
something that you're also interested in and that you kind of saw the promotion around it.
Okay, so I just have one more question for you this morning.
And this is just around collaboration.
So feel free to answer this whatever way you want.
I was just thinking, is there like anyone?
I mean, it could be an influencer or, you know, is there a person project or any kind of platform maybe that you'd like to collaborate with to grow your community or even do
you think ontology should potentially collaborate with?
Yeah so the project I have in mind is called Flutter Waves. For them they
have like it's a fintech company. So they have a deep understanding of African payment challenges and existing infrastructure really needs, or maybe it requires some kind of like ID.
That way Ontology can support or can help in solving the trust solutions.
And then the powerful inclusion, financial inclusion that you to bring to Nigerians
and people abroad also can still use that platform.
We can also partner with, let's say, influencers or Nollywood.
That's our own movie sector, Nollywood stars.
And that will help reach millions of people because once they see someone
they trust promoting a project definitely they will get on board yeah. Definitely I hope that
we can we can make this happen and that you can get the support for it to kind of move forward
with a collaboration because I mean Ontology talks all the time about trust and I think we need to we need to be showing that in partnering with different folks and showing
trust to communities and how we promote trust and security as well so so I definitely agree with you
on that and Barnabas there are all my questions for this morning so I told you that we sometimes
keep this quite short it's a lot to go I know, to kind of constantly be talking for 20
minutes. But is there anything that you wanted to wrap up with this morning? I'm just going to do
a very quick update. And then I'm sure we'll have you back on. We can deep dive into another topic
or probably get an update. But I've enjoyed chatting with you. As I said, it's the first
time we've been on a Spaces together. So it's nice to just do, I think, an introduction for
any folks that might tune in.
But yeah, as I said, is there anything you'd like to wrap up with or add to?
Yeah, I don't have so much to say, but thank you for the opportunity of speaking with you today on the development of our community in Africa.
our community in Africa and I can see some of our community members here.
And I can see some of our community members here.
So all we have to say is thank you and then let's see how we can host another space in
the near future to come.
Barnabas, you've already told us so much, so I really appreciate you taking the time
out to join me this morning.
As I said, you've been super active joining a bunch of different spaces, so I know it's
more time out of your schedule, but I think we're after getting a better understanding obviously of your background but also your overall
goal for building out the Nigerian and the kind of broader African community and I hope that
Ontology can continue to support in that and for anybody that's on the call or that might tune in
later if you would like to collaborate with Dontology or even just specifically within the African community,
just reach out to myself or Barnabas or Jeff
and we'd be more than happy to support.
Barnabas, thank you so much for your time.
Obviously, let's stay connected
and then we can organise the different spaces.
Could be cool to get Dave on from Orange.
We could talk a little bit more about reputation.
But yeah, always open to these ideas.
So Barnabas, feel free to drop off or you can stay. I'm just going to do a quick update.
Okay, cool. So yeah, appreciate Barnabas taking the time out of his day to join us. We had Dave last week who kind of did a deep dive into a bunch of different case studies that Orange are focusing on when it comes
to ZKTLS. So there are five case studies within the series. Dave went through three of them last
week. I think we're going to get them on again next week to go through the final two. If anybody's
interested, there's already one live on the blog. So last week we went into privacy preserving. So
this was all talking
about like exchange balance proofs for under collateralized DeFi lending. So this was really
interesting actually. And then we went into a DAO civil resistance, looking at kind of multi-source
social ZK TLS proofs. There's also go, we also chatted about compliance. So this is privacy
preserving, access control for RWAs. RWAs, I think AI agents,
definitely all these topics that are becoming more and more popular as we kind of go through 2025.
And then two topics that we might get Dave on next week to chat about, which we didn't touch
on last week. So this is about funding. So builder funding. If you consider kind of private GitHub reputation
for grants and bounties.
So we're all for supporting builders.
Jeff says it all the time.
We've spoken about it on a bunch of different calls.
This is ideally what Ontology is built for,
is to help builders build, essentially help developers build.
And then GameFi, which is an interesting topic
when it comes to ontology.
We just wrapped up a four-part series that was hosted by Jeff and Humpty, supported by Polaris
and a bunch of other Harbingers, but they had folks on from across Web3 talking about gaming
within the space, GameFi, also looking at decentralized identity and how that connects in.
So this case study I think is going to be quite interesting. But this is GameFi, so it's anti-bot gating
and skill-based rewards without doxing.
So I think that could be really interesting.
But also just to draw everyone's attention to Orange Protocol.
Again, I know Barnabas had just mentioned them.
I've just gone through some case studies.
But you'll also see that there is a campaign live within Orange
when it comes to ontology.
So this is all about swapping your collaborative NFTs to 50 ONG.
So this is all part of our loyalty program that if you're going to be joining any of our calls
or kind of coming to a certain community or joining in with certain community initiatives,
initiatives, you can collect these NFTs. So the whole idea is to kind of get folks to participate
you can collect these NFTs.
in more than just one call or one spaces. So you can collect any of these by joining, as I said,
a bunch of different campaigns with other projects, also AMAs, and then there's giveaways as well. So
if you've collected 10 of these, so these are your collaborate NFTs, you can swap them into 50 ONG.
So these are your collaborate NFTs.
You can swap them into 50ONG.
So if there's any issues, don't hesitate to reach out.
But go through Orange Protocol to do this.
The campaign is live and it should be super simple to do.
But if you have any issues, just don't hesitate to reach out. Thank you. And then finally last week, so consensus round 259 has ended.
So there's a summary of the annualized yield.
So don't hesitate to check that out.
That's live on X.
We always post this.
So if you have any questions, let us know.
And also we had a bunch of content going around
with our collaboration on Exelix so this is they do kind of a deep dive into what are ontology
tokens so you can explore the benefits of swapping them on Exelix they have content on their blog and
then we also have content on our blog kind of letting you guys know exactly how this functions
and the
collaboration there but again I always say if you have any questions don't hesitate to reach out
I'd love to draw everyone's attention as well we focus a lot on X I mean or I always go between X
and Twitter I mean we host these spaces and then Bella hosts our quiz in discord once a month but
we are active on other platforms and it's something that we're going to be focusing on just to ensure that the community has like full access to all of
our content across different platforms so um if anybody's on linkedin uh would love for you guys
to be engaging with our content there um we will be posting more articles there as well um and it
is a great place for most folks to go to to kind of
work on developing kind of their their their network I would strongly recommend it even
coming from from web3 I think LinkedIn is a great resource also medium as well so when we're looking
at medium versus our blog so obviously our blog we're kind of trying to generate our own traffic
but medium obviously kind of already has that there so it's a separate community and we're
going to be updating medium a lot more and we're going to hopefully have medium
as more of a community focus so we'll be inviting creators or any content writers anybody that wants
to kind of write for ontology to write on medium to share kind of developments within ontology to
share their ideas as well but just make sure it would be great to see some support on Medium as well.
Make sure that you're engaging with our content there
so that the broader community can kind of see what's going on.
And then as well as Reddit, Ontology is on Reddit.
Again, would be great to see if there's any subreddits
or any conversations that you think Ontology should be involved in.
We're happy to do that as well.
And then also YouTube.
We should be uploading hopefully some of our spaces
from X onto YouTube and then Jeff will be hosting a few more talks that he was doing on those
Fridays. I think they should be coming up as well. So Ontology is active across a bunch of different
platforms, not just X or Telegram. So it would be great to see support or kind of engagement
there as well. And also any recommendations for what we should be doing with those platforms too.
Always open to that.
And as I say every week, I'd just like to remind everybody about our OntoNotStarter package.
This was developed a couple of months ago.
It's kind of always live running in the background,
but essentially it's just to support everybody in like downloading OntoWallet,
getting your OntoID, supporting your staking.
Harbingers are there to do so. So you can go to Discord or Telegram, the English channel,
and then you can, I think, yeah, there's rewards anyway. So you can be in with a chance to win
certain rewards and then you also get additional support for staking. So it's definitely worth it.
It was created to make sure that everybody could use the Ontology products and had support
every step of the way.
But it's also there for us to kind of continue with developing collaborations too.
Okay, awesome.
That's pretty much everything for me today.
I'm going to thank Barnabas again.
It was really great to just get his insights from the kind of Nigerian
and African community.
There's been a bunch of different content on X around this
and around how this community has been developing
and exactly what Ontology wants to do.
So I'd recommend everybody to go there and learn a little bit more.
And hopefully you'll have some interesting ideas
kind of taken away from the call today.
But as I said, this is just one of the short intro calls
that we like to do.
So I think we'll take things kind of away from the call and
we'll see if we can develop some more spaces potentially have dave come on for and we can
have a chat about reputation um but as always i appreciate everybody joining in happy friday
again as i said and yeah would love to hear from you folks when it comes to feedback around content
or support when i um across those channels that I just mentioned. So thanks so much.
