How I Got Started with Cardano
I got into Cardano in 2022 through a Catalyst-funded initiative called the Ngong Road Cardano Blockchain Lab in Nairobi. It was my first real exposure to blockchain development. I joined as a developer mentee and gained hands-on experience with Cardano tools—running nodes, writing smart contracts, and contributing to open-source projects.
What stood out to me wasn’t just the tech; it was the ecosystem. Catalyst was funding real work in Africa. People from different countries were learning, building, and supporting each other. It wasn’t just talk. There was action.
I’ve always liked building things, tools, apps, anything that solves a problem. Cardano gave me a platform to do that and a community that cares about growth, especially in places like Africa, where opportunity matters.
What I’ve Built on Cardano So Far
After joining the ecosystem through Catalyst, I started contributing by building tools and experiments that solve real problems. Most of my work has been through Catalyst-funded projects or in collaboration with other builders.
Catalyst Explorer: My First Major Contribution
One of my first major contributions to the Cardano ecosystem was working on the first version of the Catalyst Explorer, which helps people track proposals, votes, and participation in Cardano’s decentralized governance. The app is currently live at Lido Nation.
Project Catalyst is a vital funding mechanism within Cardano, designed to support builders, developers, and community-led ideas. However, navigating the vast amount of proposals and data across different funding rounds can be overwhelming. The Catalyst Explorer brings much-needed:
- Transparency – Allowing users to see who submitted what, how much funding they requested, and whether they were funded.
- Accountability – Tracking project outcomes and community participation.
- Growth insights – Enabling deeper understanding of how resources are being allocated and how the ecosystem is evolving.
By making all this data accessible, searchable, and actionable, the Explorer empowers both newcomers and veterans in the Cardano community to engage meaningfully with governance.
What I Learned
My first real end-to-end feature in the Catalyst Explorer was its robust search and filter system, and I loved implementing it, probably due to how many times it broke and how I was able to get everything to work in harmony.
This wasn’t just about writing queries or dropdown menus, it was a complete exercise in:
- Information Architecture: Structuring how users could navigate funding rounds, tags, challenge settings, proposal titles, proposers, and statuses.
- Performance Optimization: Making sure the experience remained fast and snappy even when handling thousands of proposals.
- User-Centered Design: Every interaction from filter chips to pagination had to be smooth.
This project was where I truly learned how deep thought into architecture and user experience can transform raw data into a tool people enjoy using.
Learn to Earn: Incentivizing Blockchain Education in Africa
After Catalyst Explorer, my next major project was “Learn to Earn”, a gamified learning platform designed to onboard Swahili-speaking users into the Cardano ecosystem through incentivized education.
The goal was simple: learn about Cardano, take a quiz, earn ADA.
Why It Matters
Cardano is committed to growth in Africa, and real growth starts with awareness. With over 200 million Swahili speakers across 14 countries, language inclusivity is critical. So we built on the existing educational work at Lidonation.com, which already features articles about Cardano and Project Catalyst in English, Spanish, and Swahili, and added a new layer: rewards.
How It Worked
- Users read educational articles in Swahili.
- Take a short quiz.
- Earn $1 worth of ADA per quiz up to $25 total.
- Collect achievement NFTs after completing milestones (25, 50, 75 quizzes).
- To participate, users must set up a Cardano wallet and connect it to the platform.
Every quiz completed meant one more person setting up a wallet, learning how blockchain works, and becoming capable of participating in DeFi, staking, NFTs, and Project Catalyst.
My Role
On the development side, my team and I worked on:
- Quiz and reward logic tied to unique wallets.
- Wallet connectivity and onboarding flows.
- Gamification mechanics for distributing ADA and NFTs.
- Frontend and backend systems for user tracking, eligibility, and anti-abuse in this case, multiple user accounts.
This project helped me explore the intersection of education, gamification, and blockchain tooling and how we can use that combo to make a real-world impact.
The run for this project ended, but you can still participate in our very epoch quizzes to get cool tokens like NMKR and hosky tokens.
What I’m currently working on
Catalyst Explorer 2.0
This version looks to open-source the entire code base, so we could have other community members bring their thoughts and creativity to it. We are adding some new cool features like
- Proposal Tinder - people can create a list of likes and dislikes, we are also looking to add AI to this mix so it can learn from your pics and build a recommendation algorithm for you.
- Proposal Comparison feature - this will focus more on the research factor; you should be able to compare proposals side by side and keep a comparison list.
- We have started working on a prototype for future catalyst voting and delegation. We are still waiting for Project Catalyst to fully deliver on the APIs so users can vote from anywhere.
- Soon to come, users will also be able to claim their catalyst profiles and make it accessible to the community, all your catalyst roles will be tied to this account and you can add more details to it to connect it to your, all your proposals, reviews and other contributions will be listed on this profile, as single place for people to follow on all your work in cardano.
Cardano Ambassador Tool
This project is under the Cardano Foundation, and we are looking to have a dedicated app for our ambassadors that solely focuses on their contributions and extends some cool features and functions that will soon be implemented. Ill document more on this once things start taking shape.
Conclusion
Cardano has been an incredible journey so far, from my first steps at the Ngong Road Lab to building tools that make the ecosystem more accessible. Along the way, I’ve learned that technology is only as powerful as the people using it, and community is at the heart of growth.
This blog is just the beginning of sharing that journey: the lessons, the tools, the experiments, and the small wins that help us all learn, build, and grow together. Stay tuned for more stories, tutorials, and insights as we continue exploring Cardano and making it easier for everyone to participate.
Let’s build, learn, and grow, one block at a time.