A cohort member building against property fraud.

Five minutes in Ikorodu, Lagos at the close of Web3Bridge Cohort 12, the second episode in the run of short interviews We Them Media filmed as the cohort wrapped. The tape opens on the project and works back to the person.

Web3Bridge founder Ayodeji Awosika sets it up from the same building, counting the cohort in and out and listing the countries applications for the next one came from.

Then the introduction: “my name is Inanna Okoye. I’m from Anambra State”, and Igbo by tribe.

The way in was a friend who had already been through it. “I got to know about Web3 and Web3 Bridge from a friend, Papa”, who was in the last cohort, and who said “Web3 Bridge will be like the best place to like learn and also meet people and community”.

The verdict on the course keeps both halves. “it’s actually been a nice experience, although it’s been stressful”, and the stress is the part that did the work: “it kept me on my toes”, and “I’ve learned to like adapt to like every situation, every like trials, every point in time.” The mentors get credit, and so does everyone else in the building.

That is the answer to the community question too, and it is a wider answer than the classroom. “I’ve not only learned from the teachers, I’ve learned from the people I’ve met”, the sentence continues into “the events we’ve attended and what they’ve said”, and lands on “the community is a great one”.

What comes next is put as joining rather than launching. The plan is “to build stuff with different people, to join African, different African communities, to experience the whole Web3 ecosystem as a whole”.

The project is the one the tape opens with. The team is “working on getting like connecting agents or landlords and civilians or people that are looking for houses together”, and it has a name: “it’s called PropertyChain”. The description is plain: “a decentralized app that brings house owners or people that are willing to sell their lands or properties to people that are willing to buy”. Two claims are made for it, and the first is the one that matters in a property market where paperwork can be faked. It “saves them from fraud”, and it “helps them save their money as well”.

The advice at the end is not about the syllabus. Apply, and be in the room: “it’s better to come here and be among people and learn with people and grow with people as well and join communities.” Then the count down, and the word the channel closes on.