DigiOats: The Lagos Startup Building Africa’s Bitcoin Developer Pipeline
On a Thursday morning inside a co-working space in Enugu, southeastern Nigeria, three developers—Maxwell, Jovany, and Landry—were staring at lines of Rust code on their laptops, decoding Bitcoin transactions character by character. By the afternoon, they had the highest scores in the room. By Friday, one of them walked out with a Trezor hardware wallet. By Saturday, all of them walked out with something more valuable: a new identity as Bitcoin developers.
This is DigiOats in practice. Not a conference. Not a panel discussion. A hands-on, technically rigorous bootcamp that drops software engineers into the deep end of Bitcoin protocol development and expects them to swim.
From Lagos to the Continent
DigiOats, co-founded by CEO Heritage Falodun, started in Lagos but has quickly expanded far beyond Nigeria’s commercial capital.
In 2026 alone, the company activated programs across three cities on opposite sides of the continent: Enugu in southeastern Nigeria, Kigali in Rwanda, and Nairobi in Kenya. The expansion reflects a deliberate strategy the company calls “More City”—explicitly framing its growth beyond Lagos to capture talent wherever it exists.
Bitcoin as a Software Stack
DigiOats does not teach Bitcoin as an investment vehicle or a get-rich-quick scheme. It teaches Bitcoin as a software stack. The Enugu bootcamp curriculum included:
- Bitcoin CLI scripting and node setup
- Building from source and full node operations
- Safe transaction decoding with Rust
- Security, privacy, and self-custody with Trezor hardware
- Bitcoin for business and Lightning Network payment integration
- Bitcoin and Rust development fundamentals
Facilitators for the Enugu session included Chinedu Emmanuel and TechMaazi—instructors well-known within Nigeria’s Bitcoin development, infrastructure, and business space. “The Bitcoin development program in Enugu was so good and there was just absolutely a lot to learn,” said Chiamakah Odike, a bootcamp participant.
The Partnership Architecture
DigiOats does not teach Bitcoin as an investment vehicle or a get-rich-quick scheme. It teaches Bitcoin as a software stack. The Enugu bootcamp curriculum included:
- Bitcoin CLI scripting and node setup
- Building from source and full node operations
- Safe transaction decoding with Rust
- Security, privacy, and self-custody with Trezor hardware
- Bitcoin for business and Lightning Network payment integration
- Bitcoin and Rust development fundamentals
Facilitators for the Enugu session included Chinedu Emmanuel and TechMaazi—instructors well-known within Nigeria’s Bitcoin development, infrastructure, and business space. “The Bitcoin development program in Enugu was so good and there was just absolutely a lot to learn,” said Chiamakah Odike, a bootcamp participant.
The Partnership Architecture
Looking Forward
With programs already running in Nigeria, Rwanda, and Kenya—and partnerships with Trezor Academy, Helicode, BlockHub Africa, and others providing infrastructure—DigiOats appears positioned to expand aggressively across the continent.
The model is replicable: find a venue partner, bring in experienced facilitators, run an intensive multi-day program, and send capable developers back into their local ecosystems with hardware, knowledge, and credentials.
For African software engineers looking to specialize in Bitcoin development, the path is becoming clearer. And for the broader ecosystem, DigiOats represents something important: a homegrown African effort to build technical capacity at the protocol layer, city by city.
Editor’s Note: This article is based on reporting by Heritage Falodun.