Why are you participating for Based Africa?

Our motivation for participating in Based Africa stems from the need to empower local African communities by providing accessible and practical onchain education. As a team of developers with deep ties to Nigeria, we recognize the transformative power of blockchain technology in solving real-world problems, from financial inclusion to secure identity management. Through LearnOnchain, we aim to contribute to Base’s mission by equipping a new generation of builders with the tools and knowledge needed to create impactful onchain solutions.

Our connection to the region goes beyond technology—we have firsthand experience with the challenges our communities face, including limited access to financial services, transparency issues, and insufficient education about blockchain technology. By participating in Based Africa, we seek to foster innovation by educating our local community and beyond, helping developers and non-developers alike harness the potential of onchain technologies to drive social and economic change.

What challenges are you focusing on?

The main challenge we are addressing is the lack of accessible onchain education and resources in Africa, which limits the potential for local developers to contribute meaningfully to the Base ecosystem. Additionally, there is a gap in understanding how blockchain solutions can be applied to solve community-specific problems, such as financial inclusion, data transparency, and access to decentralized services.

Africa, with its diverse and fast-growing digital economy, is in a prime position to benefit from onchain technologies, but without the proper educational infrastructure, this potential remains untapped. LearnOnchain seeks to bridge this gap by providing a comprehensive learning platform that is tailored to the needs of the African tech community, offering practical knowledge and hands-on experience with tools like Onchainkit, Coinbase Smart Wallet, and Coinbase Paymaster.

How does your submission address this challenge?

LearnOnchain is a Learning Management System (LMS) that equips African developers with the knowledge and resources to build onchain applications, helping them contribute to Base's mission of building a better internet. The platform is designed to be accessible, practical, and engaging, offering courses on core onchain technologies such as Onchainkit for seamless dApp integration, Coinbase Smart Wallet for secure and user-friendly wallet solutions, and Coinbase Paymaster for efficient gas fee management.

By providing structured educational paths, hands-on projects, and a supportive community, LearnOnchain empowers developers to understand and implement onchain solutions that directly address local challenges, such as improving access to decentralized financial services, enhancing transparency in governance, and creating decentralized identity management systems. The potential impact is immense, as we aim to create a network of skilled developers across Africa who can leverage Base to build solutions that benefit their communities.

Challenges we ran into

One of the major hurdles we encountered during the development of LearnOnchain was integrating clerk auth with coinbase and coinbase smart wallet, in a way that is both user-friendly and secure. Initially, authenticating and connecting with coinbasewallet was not supported and ensuring a smooth user experience proved challenging, but we overcame this by upgrading the core and reached out to their support on discord. Also faced a bug in sending the nft metadata to ipfs but fixed it by undergoing rigorous form of debugging. This allowed us to offer a more seamless onboarding experience for developers, especially those who are new to onchain development.

Additional Features

During the Buildathon, we enhanced learnOnchain by incorporating the following new features:

Onchainkit: For wallet connection and displaying of basenames and to provide developers with an easy-to-use toolkit for building onchain applications.
Coinbase Smart Wallet: Integrated for secure and streamlined wallet management, ensuring smooth interaction with dApps.
Coinbase: To authenticate users.
Clerk SDK: To manage user flows and authentication.
Pinata SDK: To upload data (images & videos) to IPFS.
Mongodb: To store and manage the database.
Solidity: For minting courses Onchain.

These additions significantly improve the user experience and provide more practical tools for developers looking to contribute to the Base ecosystem.