Growing up in a household steeped in healthcare, Victoria Abiodun’s path seemed predetermined: finish her anatomy degree at the University of Ilorin, Kwara State, northcentral Nigeria, head abroad for medical school, and never look back. As for cryptocurrency? She wanted nothing to do with it, convinced it belonged firmly in the realm of internet scams. But when an ASUU strike collided with the 2020 lockdowns, a persistent anatomy coursemate challenged her prejudice.
To make sense of the dense, jargon-laden whitepapers, she began writing her own explanations from scratch. That curiosity set off an unexpected chain reaction: from ghost-writing technical primers as an undergraduate to co-founding a gaming startup, spearheading marketing for a European decentralised identity protocol, and bootstrapping a 100-strong Solana developer chapter in Ilorin.
Today, while reading for an MBA at USC and researching high-density energy demand, she is writing the open-access, plain-English blockchain book she wishes she had read on day one. In this week’s My Life in Tech, JOHN ADOYI sits down with Abiodun to trace her accidental journey from anatomy labs to Web3 education. Victoria Abiodun, a Web3 educator, is writing a book that explains distributed technology in plain language.
Only a few years ago, she wanted nothing to do with it. As an undergraduate at the University of Ilorin in north-central Nigeria, she viewed cryptocurrency as indistinguishable from fraud; the people who evangelised it seemed either to be perpetrating scams or falling victim to them. One person challenged that conviction: a trusted friend from her anatomy class who spoke incessantly about blockchain. She struggled to reconcile his enthusiasm with the prejudice she held.
“In all honesty, the first thing that piqued my curiosity was the money he was making,” she says. “I was like, ‘What? This is crazy.’” Yet financial curiosity was merely the entry