Eric Annan bought bitcoin when it was $350. He made a lot of money from his early foray into cryptocurrencies. However, unlike most people who become professional traders and learn how to profit from crypto, Annan was more interested in the technology.
His fascination with blockchain—the technology that powers cryptocurrencies—is the reason he founded Aya HQ, which is arguably Africa’s largest Web3 incubation programme.
Behind Aya’s success are many of Annan’s failures, which have informed the philosophy behind the programme: the biggest barrier African founders face is not funding, but psychology. To Annan, blockchain is a leveller—a technology that gives Africans access.
Annan discovers crypto
Unlike most people, Annan did not get into crypto through an MMM scam or anything similar. Instead, his entrepreneurial endeavours led him to technology. Between 2013 and 2014, he resigned from his job at Huawei in Ghana to become an entrepreneur, starting with a business in Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP).
To increase his chances of success, he moved to Nigeria on a friend’s advice. “The day after we landed in Abuja, we had a paying customer. I was excited and glad I followed his advice.”
However, what seemed like a promising business ran into problems following regulations on dollar transactions in 2015. “The business collapsed because we were not able to send money to a company in Singapore to activate an account in Nigeria.”
Trying to get by after the collapse of his first business, Annan encountered cryptocurrency in 2016. “It began an evolution in my journey,” he recalls. Cryptocurrency became the turning point in his entrepreneurial career. Fascinated by it, he decided to learn more about the technology beyond speculation.
What he describes as an extensive study led to the creation of Digital Coding, one of the earliest crypto exchanges, or over-the-counter (OTC) platforms, in Nigeria. It existed alongside Nairaex, another early player in the space.
The competitive strategy was to speed up on-ramps and off-ramps, which were still quite slow at the time. Annan’s solution was simple.
“I got developers to build a website for me. Once you make the request on the website, I send the crypto to you offline.”
While the solution might have been simple, it made a lot of money. “I took a vacation to Seychelles,” Annan recalls.
However, his entrepreneurial instincts kicked in again, and during what was meant to be a holiday, he came up with another business idea. This time, though, it was about more than just making money; Annan’s inspiration came from something greater.
Building Aya HQ
During Annan’s vacation, he came across a report charting the future of blockchain, with little reference to Africa. The builders of the technology were predominantly outside the continent.
For Annan, blockchain is where Africa should stop being just a consumer. He wanted Africans to be at the forefront of building blockchain—a technology he believes could transform the continent.
His first attempt at doing this was the launch of KubitX in 2018. On the surface, KubitX was a crypto exchange that aimed to educate users and accelerate blockchain adoption, but it also saw the potential of stablecoins early. This idea led Annan and his team to secure a signed agreement with Interswitch to build a trade finance platform.
However, the startup failed. “It was a very painful one. I’d invested all the money I made from Digital Coding in KubitX.”
Out of the failure, Annan made an important discovery. He realised that the problem was not that Africans could not build, or were not building, but that they were building in silos—often trying to outdo one another. With blockchain, collaboration, rather than competition, is essential.
He also recalls how the Techpoint Startup School in 2019 helped him realise that many African founders still had much to learn about scaling their startup ideas and strengthening their technical skills.
These lessons formed part of the inspiration for Aya HQ, but Annan was close to giving up. “Life was tough, but I started thinking about building an infrastructure layer—one that didn’t require code.”
The layer he set out to build was trust, something he believes Africa lacks severely. He had first-hand experience of this with KubitX. “My co-founders betrayed my trust. Advisers screwed us over, and you’re all by yourself.”
What is Aya HQ?
Aya started out as what Annan describes as a Web3-focused TalentQL—a body or community that is trusted and can vouch for the capabilities of African talent, making it possible for them to access global opportunities.
“The goal was to get Aya trusted. You don’t need to trust the talent; you just need to trust the community that has vouched for the talent.”
Aya gained traction very quickly. However, as Annan recalls, it was not scalable because there was a shortage of talent, and although Aya had built a codeless trust infrastructure, it could not fully utilise it.
This challenge ushered in the next iteration: Aya Fellowship, a blockchain-focused training platform.
“Aya Fellowship was built around four thematic areas called PACE: problem-solving, adapting, creativity, and empathy.”
Like many of Annan’s projects, it also gained traction—so much so that Coinbase, one of the world’s largest crypto exchanges, awarded a grant to kick off the fellowship.
“The goal was to train just 100 people, but we received over 8,000 applications.” The first cohort in 2022 trained 300 people, and the second trained even more. Guided by Annan’s philosophy of building together, the training model took an unorthodox approach.
Instead of training 300 individuals, Aya trained teams of 300 people—teams specifically equipped to solve problems and build products to a minimum viable product (MVP) stage.
This approach to training informed Aya’s next iteration. “By the time we finished the cohorts, about 20 products had been built—products that could be launched into the market.”
This gave Annan clarity on what Aya would ultimately become: an incubation programme for early-stage founders. “There were many things I didn’t know as a founder until Techpoint Startup School. An incubation programme will teach founders the science and art of building a startup, so they don’t fail the way I did.”
How is Aya HQ doing?
Lisk, a Layer 2 blockchain, became a partner for the early-stage incubation programme. Since then, over 50 projects have been incubated. Annan says that when it comes to blockchain and crypto, Aya HQ is the largest early-stage incubation programme in the world.
The partnership with Lisk is closely aligned, as the blockchain focuses on projects that solve real problems within Africa, rather than simply creating another token.
Annan believes that blockchain should work for Africa, and with African builders coming together at Aya HQ to solve the continent’s most pressing problems, his vision may yet become a reality.
