The technology was not the problem.
For Peter Otobong and his team at Fraqtion Finance, the idea was simple enough: allow people to pool money to finance real-world trade, such as a Chinese company buying lithium from Nigeria. The software could be built. The architecture could be designed. The engineers could make the system work.
But then came the questions that code could not answer.
Who would license it? Who would regulate it? Where would the capital come from? Which financial institutions would support it? And how would the technology fit into the systems that already governed the movement of money and commodities across borders?
The project never launched.
For Otobong, however, its failure became one of the most important lessons of his career.
“The biggest constraints are not necessarily technical. The biggest constraints are normally the systems in which the technology is going to operate in,” he says.
It was a lesson that would change the way he looked at his profession. Technology, he began to understand, does not exist in isolation. A piece of software may work perfectly and still fail if the business around it is wrong, if regulation does not permit it, if institutions cannot support it or if the people it was built for cannot use it.