Ire Aderinokun: Nigeria’s fast-rising female tech guru

MANY young people have chosen to make a positive difference in their society or around the world. They have taken extra steps to provide solutions to help people in their everyday lives.

Sometimes, certain circumstances trigger their response to create something useful for people. For Ire Aderinokun, this happened when she wanted to buy an iPhone and there was no easy way for her to transfer her Nigerian naira into dollars to enable her friend in the US to buy it for her.

Deciding that there had to be a better way, she and her friend created a peer-to-peer exchange called Bitcoin Afrika which later grew to become Buycoins, a platform that enables Nigerians to easily buy, sell and use cryptocurrencies.

Ire Aderinokun started her programming journey at 14 due to her obsession with the online game, Neopets as a teenager using basic HTML but it was just a hobby at the time.

She went on to study Experimental Psychology for her undergraduate degree and later got a Master’s degree in Law. While pursuing her Masters’ degree, she picked up programming again. Today, she is a front-end web developer and user interface designer.

Ire is also a Google developer expert, specializing in the core front-end technologies and has written over 100 articles on these topics on her blog.bitsofco.de, and has spoken at conferences around Africa and the world.

She previously worked with eyeo, the company behind products like Adblock Plus and Flattr Plus, building open-source software to make a better internet.

Currently, she is the Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer (COO) of BuyCoins, a cryptocurrency exchange for Africa that enables users to trade cryptocurrency instantly with no wait time.

As the COO and VP of Engineering at BuyCoins, she oversees the frontend team while also managing operations as the Chief Operating Officer.

In 2020, users bought and sold a total of $141,395,605.75 of cryptocurrency on Buycoins.

Ire is well known for giving back to the community and she has helped so many women achieve their dream careers by sponsoring them on Udacity nanodegree programs.

Ire Aderinokun: Nigeria’s fast-rising female tech guru