Greetings! We are excited to share two programs beginning in June and invite you to consider participating:
1. Tekedia Nigeria Capital Market Masterclass
This program is designed to provide a comprehensive understanding of Nigeria’s capital market ecosystem, one of the most important sectors of the nation’s economy. Participants will gain practical insights into how the market functions – from legislation and regulation to technology, market products, infrastructure, core operators, etc.
Delivered by industry experts, the program provides a structured understanding of how the capital market works in practice. The program also includes internship opportunities and is being delivered in partnership with Contisx Securities Exchange Plc, an upcoming securities exchange in Nigeria.
2. Tekedia Mini-MBA
Our award-winning management and innovation program will begin its 20th Edition on June 8, 2026. The Mini-MBA has become one of Africa’s leading executive education programs, bringing together participants from around the world to learn innovation, growth strategy, business execution, and digital transformation. Early bird discounts are currently available.
The emergence of AI agents on the Solana blockchain is beginning to reshape how decentralized economies operate, and for the first time, the sector is generating measurable economic output rather than speculative hype alone.
Over the last year, crypto markets have seen countless experiments involving autonomous AI agents capable of trading, posting content, managing liquidity, executing governance decisions, and coordinating onchain activities without direct human intervention.
While earlier iterations of AI-driven blockchain systems were largely theoretical or experimental, recent developments within the Solana ecosystem suggest that autonomous agents are now producing observable economic activity across decentralized finance, creator markets, and automated infrastructure.
The significance of this milestone lies in the transition from narrative-driven speculation to verifiable utility. In previous crypto cycles, many blockchain projects depended heavily on token appreciation and community enthusiasm without demonstrating sustainable productivity. The Solana AI agent economy, however, is beginning to show indicators typically associated with real economic systems: transaction fees, service revenues, liquidity generation, computational demand, and recurring user engagement.
These metrics indicate that AI agents are no longer simply interacting with protocols for testing purposes; they are participating in markets in ways that create measurable value. One of the primary reasons Solana has become a leading environment for AI agents is its technical architecture. The network’s high throughput, low transaction costs, and fast finality make it suitable for machine-speed interactions.
Unlike traditional blockchains where high fees make frequent automated execution expensive, Solana enables autonomous agents to perform hundreds or thousands of micro-transactions efficiently. This allows AI-powered systems to continuously rebalance portfolios, manage decentralized exchanges, optimize yield strategies, and interact with applications in real time. The rise of these autonomous systems has also introduced a new form of digital labor.
AI agents are increasingly functioning as economic actors that can provide services independently. Some agents analyze market sentiment and execute trading strategies, while others generate content, manage online communities, or automate governance participation for decentralized autonomous organizations. In effect, these systems are becoming productive entities within the broader crypto economy. The value they create can be quantified through trading profits, protocol revenue, subscription payments, or transaction volume generated across the network.
Another important development is the emergence of agent-to-agent coordination. Rather than operating in isolation, some AI systems are beginning to interact directly with other autonomous entities onchain.
This creates miniature digital economies where agents negotiate, exchange data, purchase computational resources, or coordinate liquidity management autonomously. Such behavior represents an early version of machine-native commerce, where economic activity occurs between software agents with minimal human oversight. This trend could strengthen the network’s long-term positioning within the blockchain industry.
The platform has already become associated with high-performance decentralized applications, memecoin trading, and consumer-focused crypto products. AI agents introduce an additional layer of utility that could attract developers, capital, and infrastructure investment. If autonomous systems continue generating measurable transaction flow and protocol activity, they may become a major source of sustained network demand.
However, challenges remain. Questions surrounding security, accountability, manipulation, and governance are becoming increasingly important as autonomous agents gain financial influence. Poorly designed AI systems could amplify volatility, exploit vulnerabilities, or create systemic risks within decentralized markets. Regulators may also scrutinize autonomous trading systems and AI-managed financial operations more aggressively in the coming years.
Even with these uncertainties, the measurable economic output emerging from Solana’s AI agent ecosystem marks a pivotal moment for both artificial intelligence and blockchain technology. It suggests that decentralized networks are evolving beyond passive infrastructure into active digital economies populated by autonomous participants capable of producing value independently.
Moniepoint, Africa’s fintech unicorn, has announced a strategic partnership with tell. money to enhance the security and reliability of its UK payments infrastructure as it deepens its expansion into the United Kingdom financial services market.
The collaboration will enable Moniepoint to implement the Confirmation of Payee (CoP) account name-checking service through its remittance platform, Monieworld.
The service is designed to verify the account details of payment recipients before transactions are completed, helping to reduce the risk of fraud and misdirected payments while meeting UK compliance requirements for newly authorised financial firms.
The partnership will be delivered through Monieworld, also known as Moniepoint GB, a subsidiary of Moniepoint, launched just over a year ago. The platform enables UK residents to send money directly to Nigerian bank accounts using multiple payment options, including Monieworld accounts, debit and credit cards, British bank accounts, Apple Pay, and Google Pay.
Under the agreement, Tell. money will provide the name-checking infrastructure that powers the CoP service on the Monieworld platform. Moniepoint said it selected Tell. money because of its ability to deploy the solution quickly, securely, and with minimal operational complexity.
Speaking on the partnership, Ravi Jakhodia, CEO of Monieworld, said,
“Our goal with Monieworld is to build financial services for Africans in the diaspora, starting with Nigerians in the UK. We want to make it easier for people to support loved ones, invest back home, and manage cross-border finances with confidence. This partnership with tell. Money helps us build that experience securely and seamlessly.
“We selected tell. money as our preferred partner because it gives us the clarity and flexibility we needed to meet Confirmation of Payee requirements without unnecessary complexity. By taking on the full weight of CoP compliance, from setup and accreditation to ongoing monitoring, tell. money allows us to focus on what matters most: serving our customers and building a trusted financial service.”
David Monty, CEO at tell. money, also commented on the collaboration, stating,
“Moniepoint is clear on what it wants to deliver and how it wants to scale. Our job was to provide the access layer that fits around that, not the other way around. We focus on making things work cleanly, reliably, and without the noise. Newly authorised firms entering the UK market are choosing infrastructure that is ready to go, with minimal internal lift. In Moniepoint’s case, it meant staying focused on what they are best at, serving their customers, while knowing their regulatory requirements were handled.”
The partnership aligns with Moniepoint’s broader international growth strategy as the fintech continues to expand its footprint beyond Africa. Since its launch last year, Monieworld has gained traction among Nigerians living in the UK, positioning itself as a preferred remittance platform due to its speed and reliability.
Founded in 2015 by Tosin Eniolorunda and Felix Ike, Moniepoint provides payments, banking, credit, and business management tools to more than 20 million businesses and individuals globally through its integrated financial ecosystem.
The company has also established itself as Nigeria’s largest merchant acquirer, powering the majority of Point-of-Sale (POS) transactions in the country. Through its subsidiaries, Moniepoint processes over $22 billion in monthly transactions while maintaining profitability.
The fintech was established with a mission to bridge the financial inclusion gap by providing seamless banking, payment, credit, and business management solutions to individuals and micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs).
In a continent where millions remain unbanked or underserved by traditional financial institutions, the company positioned itself as a technology-driven platform focused on empowering businesses and enabling easier access to financial services.
Over the years, Moniepoint has expanded rapidly, becoming one of the largest payment processors in Nigeria. The company has played a significant role in enabling cashless transactions for small merchants, traders, and businesses across urban and rural communities in Nigeria.
When industry leaders suggest that the nation lacks world-class talent, they are often observing a symptom rather than the cause. As noted in the critique of this stance, there is a fundamental contradiction in building billion-dollar payment infrastructures on the back of Nigerian resourcefulness – utilizing market women, street agents, and small business owners – only to later question the intelligence of that same demographic. This tension suggests that the problem is not a lack of ‘raw material’ in the youth, but rather a misplaced curriculum and a leadership gap that fails to provide the right ‘soil’ for that talent to grow into global standards. If we look at the global context, it becomes clear that this is not a uniquely Nigerian character flaw but a universal structural mismatch. From the United States to Japan and Germany, economies are struggling because the skills produced by traditional education systems no longer match the demands of modern employers. However, the African context is exacerbated by an educational ‘ruler’ that was never designed for its people.
We are currently measuring Nigerian youth against Western corporate templates that fail to recognize the extraordinary economic intelligence already operating in the informal sector. A youth who manages a complex logistics operation via WhatsApp or navigates volatile market pricing in their head possesses high-level ‘Streetwise’ skills that simply haven’t been formalized or ‘packaged’ for a CV.
The debate sparked by Moniepoint CEO Tosin Eniolorunda isn’t just about technical skills; it is a fundamental inquiry into how environment, education, and industry interact. By analysing this through the lens of Professor Patrick Oseloka Ezepue’s RIAT framework (Research, Integration, Applications, Teaching) and his Eagle-Raven metaphor, we can see both the validity of the critique and the roadmap for a solution.
This is where the RIAT framework – Research, Integration, Applications, and Teaching – and the Oselux Streetwise MBA provide a necessary alternative pathway. The goal is to move from a ‘Raven state,’ where talent is restricted by its environment, to an ‘Eagle state,’ where it is globally competitive. This transition requires a radical reimagining of higher education. Instead of producing graduates who are merely academic, the RIAT model/ framework insists on an integration of knowledge where students develop technically, ethically, and practically. It acknowledges that if the current ‘soil’ of the university is poor, we must enrich it with research-led teaching that reflects the real-world market, effectively turning ‘survivalist creativity’ into ‘systemic innovation.’ Furthermore, there is a critical need for industry leaders to shift from being mere consumers of talent to being builders of it. When global giants like Toyota faced similar skills crises, they didn’t simply complain about unemployability – they built internal training philosophies to cultivate world-class competence from the inside.
A technology company in a developing economy that expects talent to arrive fully formed is suffering from a leadership gap, not a talent gap.
An Alternative Pathway
The “Alternative Pathway” championed by Professor Ezepue and Oselux Global Education suggests that we must develop the ‘whole person’ – combining discipline and ethics with technical mastery – to bridge the trust deficit that plagues many professional interactions today. Ultimately, the employability gap in Nigeria is a systemic failure of process, not a failure of individual potential. Until we are honest about the fact that our education system produces graduates without practical tools and our industries are often unwilling to invest in long-term development, we will continue to have this conversation without gaining traction. By adopting a ‘Streetwise’ approach that formalizes the brilliance of the Nigerian market and applying the RIAT framework to our institutions, we can stop blaming the output and start fixing the process. The solution lies in creating an environment where the “Market meets Economics,” ensuring that every Nigerian youth is given the technical and intellectual wings to fly as an Eagle in the global arena.
Talking Points and Counterpoints
The Point: The Environmental Talent Gap. Eniolorunda’s core argument is that while raw intelligence is universal, ‘world-class’ talent is a product of its ecosystem. He posits that Nigeria’s current environment – marked by infrastructure deficits and educational systems detached from global industry standards prevents even the brightest minds from reaching a globally competitive top tier. This aligns with Professor Ezepue’s ‘Raven’ metaphor. In this context, the Raven represents the localized, limited potential of a student or professional who is intelligent but restricted by their surroundings. Without exposure to high-level Research and modern Applications (the R and A in RIAT), talent remains ‘unrefined,’ capable of solving local problems but perhaps struggling to architect the complex, scalable systems required for global tech giants.
The Counterpoint – Undervalued Resilience and Local Innovation. Critics and groups like the Alliance for Ethics argue that this assessment is demotivating and overlooks the massive strides made by Nigerian developers who have built billion-dollar companies despite these very environmental hurdles. The counter-argument is that ‘world-class’ is often a subjective Western benchmark that ignores the unique, high-level problem-solving skills required to navigate the Nigerian market – skills a Silicon Valley engineer might lack. Furthermore, critics argue that if a gap exists, it is a failure of industry leadership to invest in the talent pipeline. They suggest that companies claiming a lack of talent must show proof of their efforts to cultivate it locally before looking abroad or dismissing the current workforce.
The Synthesis – RIAT and the Streetwise MBA. The tension between these views is exactly what Professor Ezepue’s Streetwise MBA and RIAT framework aim to resolve. The debate shouldn’t be about whether Nigerians are world-class, but how they become world-class through a structured transition from Raven to Eagle.
Integration of Knowledge (I): The Streetwise MBA argues that technical skill alone isn’t enough. To be ‘world-class,’ a developer needs the ‘streetwise’ ability to integrate business logic, economic reality, and global standards into their code.
Research-Led Teaching (R & T): The gap Eniolorunda identifies is often a ‘knowledge gap.’ By moving away from rote learning and toward research-based teaching, Nigerian institutions can produce graduates who don’t just use tools, but understand how to build them.
The Eagle Metaphor: The ‘Eagle’ is the globally competitive professional who has transcended their environment. Ezepue’s model suggests that world-class status isn’t something you are born with, but an altitude you reach by applying RIAT principles to overcome environmental gravity.
Closing Thoughts
Moniepoint CEO, Tosin Eniolorunda, has identified a symptom – a mismatch between local output and global expectations. Professor Ezepue has provided an elixir – in the form of a systemic overhaul of how we teach and apply knowledge. The path forward is not to debate if the talent is ‘good enough,’ but to use the RIAT framework to ensure that every ‘Raven’ in the Nigerian ecosystem is given the technical, intellectual, and ‘streetwise’ tools to fly as an ‘Eagle.’ The goal is to move from a nation of intelligent individuals to a nation of world-class innovators. Indeed, the RIAT framework addresses Nigeria’s technical talent gap by bridging academic knowledge with practical skills, as highlighted in the ‘Streetwise MBA’ initiative. The framework directly counters the ‘environmental limitations’ on talent development raised by Eniolorunda, emphasizing structured knowledge integration to achieve global standards.
Key initiatives within this RIAT ecosystem include the Oselux Global Education, the Eagle-Raven metaphor for academic impact, and Streetwise MBA lessons – a curriculum designed for skills development. Ezepue’s RIAT Framework (Research, Integration, Applications, and Teaching) and the Streetwise MBA principles, is designed to transition learners from ‘Raven’ (environmentally limited) to ‘Eagle’ (globally competitive) states. Pilot programs focus on closing the employability gap through four core modules, each integrating the 7E skills – Expertise, Experience, Entrepreneurship, Enterprise Development, Employability, Emotional Intelligence, and Ethics.
NVIDIA has become far more than a semiconductor company. It now functions as the clearest real-time signal for the global artificial intelligence infrastructure cycle, reflecting the intensity of capital expenditure flowing into compute, cloud architecture, and data center expansion.
Every quarterly earnings report from NVIDIA is now interpreted not simply as a corporate update, but as a macroeconomic reading on the strength of the AI economy itself. Investors, governments, technology firms, and even crypto markets increasingly use NVIDIA’s trajectory as a proxy for the broader direction of digital infrastructure growth.
The reason is straightforward. AI has become the dominant investment narrative of the decade, and NVIDIA sits directly at the center of the compute stack powering that transformation. Modern large language models, autonomous systems, recommendation engines, robotics platforms, and AI agents require immense computational resources. Those resources are overwhelmingly dependent on GPUs, networking hardware, and accelerated computing systems where NVIDIA currently maintains an extraordinary lead.
As a result, sectors tied to AI infrastructure have become deeply interconnected. Semiconductors, hyperscale cloud providers, data center operators, energy grids, and networking companies are now moving as part of the same macro trade.
When NVIDIA posts stronger-than-expected demand, markets immediately extrapolate that cloud giants are accelerating AI spending, that enterprise adoption remains strong, and that the AI cycle still has room to expand. Conversely, any sign of slowing GPU demand raises concerns that the broader technology expansion may be reaching saturation. This interconnectedness explains why equity markets have increasingly traded around AI infrastructure expectations over the past two years.
Companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, and Meta are collectively spending hundreds of billions of dollars building AI-capable cloud infrastructure. Data center construction has surged globally, driving demand not only for chips but also for cooling systems, fiber networks, power generation, and real estate. AI infrastructure has effectively become the new industrial buildout of the digital era.
Risk appetite across financial markets has increasingly synchronized with this cycle. During periods when AI infrastructure demand accelerates, investors tend to rotate aggressively into growth assets, technology equities, and speculative sectors. Liquidity flows toward innovation narratives, reinforcing bullish sentiment across markets. The perception that AI will generate exponential productivity gains has encouraged investors to tolerate higher valuations and extend risk further out on the curve.
Crypto markets have also become indirectly tied to this infrastructure cycle. Bitcoin, Ethereum, and AI-related digital assets increasingly trade in correlation with technology sentiment rather than in isolation. When NVIDIA rallies sharply, crypto markets often follow because the same institutional capital driving AI enthusiasm also fuels speculative appetite in digital assets. The overlap is structural: both sectors depend heavily on abundant liquidity, high-risk tolerance, and belief in transformative technological change.
There is also a deeper technological convergence emerging between AI and blockchain ecosystems. Decentralized compute markets, tokenized GPU networks, AI-agent economies, and on-chain infrastructure coordination are becoming serious areas of experimentation.
As AI models demand more computational power, crypto-native systems are attempting to create alternative marketplaces for distributed compute resources. This creates feedback loops between semiconductor demand, cloud economics, and blockchain innovation. NVIDIA’s importance reflects a broader reality about the modern economy. The AI race is no longer merely about software.
It is fundamentally about infrastructure dominance: who controls the chips, the energy, the data centers, the networks, and the capital flows required to power intelligent systems at global scale. NVIDIA has become the market’s preferred lens into that transformation, making it one of the most consequential companies in the world economy today.
