There is a particular kind of person who, before they know what a career is, is already doing the work. They are not prodigies in the traditional sense. They do not write code or build an app at age twelve; they are simply restlessly curious, and that curiosity, left to blossom, eventually becomes a profession. Daniel Anomfueme is that kind of person.
Today, Anomfueme is a technical project manager and community builder, though he is quick to add that the description does not fully capture how he sees himself.
“I think of myself as ambitious,” he says. “Someone who can zoom out to see the big picture and then zoom in to get things done.”
It is a self-description that has been portrayed throughout his career. Anomfueme has worked as a technical project manager, helped secure millions in funding for a decentralised autonomous organisation, launched a blockchain governance platform, founded the first decentralised science community on the African continent, and quietly built a home server lab that runs more than thirty services for himself and his friends.
Screens and curiosity: How it all started
Anomfueme grew up in a family he describes as middle-class. Not wealthy, not struggling, just a family that could eat, and that occasionally had access to a computer.
One of his earliest interests was comic books, and although he could not afford to buy them, he found a workaround online. He would visit Wikipedia frequently to read comics and learn about Greek mythology.
“I also used to go to Nairaland. There was a mobile phone technology forum, and I spent a lot of time there.”
It was an early lesson in how the Internet could democratise access to knowledge, an area he would later build a career around.
The real technological revolution for Anomfueme came with a Samsung Galaxy Star, a small white Android phone he received in junior secondary school. It was a modest device, but it opened a door. He discovered the Android modding community where enthusiasts shared custom operating systems, or ROMs, that could be flashed onto devices to replace the manufacturer’s software.
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He was intrigued and decided to try his hand at it.
“I remember when I was in senior secondary school, I took the phone, and I wanted to flash a new custom ROM, and I bricked the phone, and I had to use my computer studies teacher’s laptop to fix it. But I remember being so scared of my father’s reaction.”
For him, this was a formative moment. He had broken something by trying to understand it, which is the definition of hands-on learning, one that would go on to influence him in the future.
By the time a laptop entered the household and his father subscribed to home Internet, Anomfueme was spending his time on online gaming platforms and educational software that presented curriculum questions in an interactive format. He was not studying in any formal sense. He was playing with technology, learning its rhythms, developing an instinct for it. When he arrived at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN), to study computer science, someone asked if he already knew how to code.
“I’ve always used technology, but I did not know what was happening in the background. I did not know how it was built or how it worked. I just knew how to use it very well.”
In his neighbourhood, that was already enough to make him useful. Older residents with Facebook account problems would seek out Anomfueme. He was the unofficial IT support for an entire community before he had ever written a line of code.
If Anomfueme’s childhood was about absorbing technology, his university years were about sharing it. He arrived at UNN and quickly found his people, the tech community on campus. It was through this hub that he encountered the Google Developers Students Club, now known as the Google Developers Group on campus, which changed the trajectory of his career.
“It was a bunch of random people. We were just fascinated by technology. We were trying to build cool stuff on campus,” he says of those early days. “We were doing it for the love of the game, for passion. We tried startup ideas that failed. It was fun.”
From campus leadership to decentralised science
While Anomfueme was building communities on campus, he was also building a professional record. During this time, he worked at Varscon, an IT solutions company, as a technical project intern, where his team shipped at least six projects for various clients. It was an experience that grounded him in the reality of product delivery, such as timelines, requirements, and the constant negotiation between what clients want and what is actually buildable.
It was during this period that he came across a tweet that would redirect his career entirely. Approaching his final year at UNN, he saw a post from the co-founder of VitaDAO, a decentralised autonomous organisation focused on funding longevity research, about an opening for a technical project manager, leading Anomfueme to send a message, attach his portfolio, and make a case for himself. This decision ultimately led him to a burgeoning career in decentralised science.
VitaDAO operates at the intersection of two emerging fields: decentralised science (DeSci) and blockchain-based governance. As a technical project manager embedded in the coordination working group, Anomfueme wore many hats: product lead, operations support, and outreach coordinator. His most tangible contribution was to the organisation’s funding. He was part of the team that helped secure an initial $4.1 million in funding for VitaDAO’s products and research activities.
He also spearheaded the launch of VitaDAO Global, a decentralised governance platform that allowed DAO members and token holders to participate in organisational decisions and access token-based discounts on biotech-related products.
“I was in charge of the product specification, the requirements, and managing user feedback,” he says of his role. “I also led the survey to get data from community members before we started developing it into a finished product.”
Building the continent’s first decentralised science community
By 2022, Anomfueme had identified a clear gap. Decentralised science (DeSci) was growing as a field, but the conversation was almost entirely happening outside Africa.
DeSci, as a field, sits at the intersection of blockchain technology and open science; a movement that argues scientific research, data, and methods should be freely accessible, not locked behind journal paywalls. The problem it addresses is real: a researcher in Lagos trying to build on existing literature often has to pay significant fees simply to read the papers on which their work depends.
“Knowledge is not built in silos,” Anomfueme says. “Every work is built on the foundation of another work. That’s literally how it works.”
Blockchain offers potential solutions such as decentralised funding mechanisms for research, transparent peer-review systems, and infrastructure for reproducibility.
DeSci Africa, founded by Anomfueme, brings this conversation to the continent. Its community is deliberately mixed with traditional scientists, blockchain developers, blockchain enthusiasts, and people who are simply curious. The organisation has run workshops in Kenya, Ghana, and Nigeria, with sessions ranging from introductions to the field to hands-on technical deep dives.
The challenge, Anomfueme points out, is structural.
“When it comes to pure science, it’s not really popular in this part of the world. Many of the Africans doing strict scientific research are doing it abroad.”
The goal, he says, is to make the model resilient to geography.
“With decentralisation, irrespective of where you are, you can still contribute your knowledge. You can also collaborate and work together.”
What comes next: A knowledge expansion
Anomfueme is deliberate about framing his next chapter. He has been spending the past year deepening his understanding of DevOps, the discipline that bridges software development and IT operations, through hands-on experience administering his home lab.
“I am doing a knowledge expansion on DevOps,” he says. “I would like to explore the infrastructural sides of things and pretty much work with the accumulation of skills I’ve had over the years.”
Decentralised science remains one of the more misunderstood corners of the blockchain world, not because the problem it addresses is obscure, but because it has become so normalised that most people no longer see it as a problem.
Scientific knowledge, the kind that supports medicine, agriculture, climate research, and public health, sits largely behind paywalls controlled by a handful of academic publishers. Researchers in Lagos, Nairobi, or Accra who want to build on existing work often cannot access it without paying fees that their institutions cannot afford.
DeSci’s argument is simply that this arrangement is bad for science and that blockchain infrastructure offers a credible alternative through funding mechanisms via DAOs, transparent on-chain peer review, and immutably logged, reproducible research. What has been missing, particularly on the African continent, is the human infrastructure to carry the conversation.
Anomfueme’s career sits precisely at that point. His work at VitaDAO was not just operational; it was translational, turning a novel funding and governance model into a functional one that attracted $4.1 million and enabled the launch of a live platform. His work with DeSci Africa is doing something similar at the ecosystem level: making a field that struggles to explain itself legible to scientists, developers, and curious people across a continent that has been largely absent from the conversation.
These are product problems as much as they are advocacy problems. And they are exactly the kind of problems that reward someone who knows how to zoom out and zoom in.
