From a Failed Voting System to Blockchain Infrastructure: The Story Behind Blockops
When the results of a university election appeared, something was wrong: the number of recorded votes did not match the number of students who had participated.
Until then, Choice Polls – the electronic voting system built by Nigerian software developer Adedayo Akinpelu and his team – had worked reliably. Several university departments had used it successfully and the team believed it was ready for larger elections.
Then one election changed everything.
The voting process appeared to run smoothly, but the discrepancy in the final tally quickly raised suspicions of manipulation. As the developer behind the software, Akinpelu became the immediate suspect.
The experience exposed more than a technical problem. It showed him that when software controls something as consequential as votes, money or institutional decisions, reliability alone is not enough. A system must also preserve evidence that allows others to verify what happened.
That lesson would shape Akinpelu’s journey from university programmer to founder and CEO of Blockops, and eventually influence the development of Onstacks, the company’s enterprise blockchain infrastructure platform.
Learning to Build
Akinpelu’s path into technology was not straightforward. He first enrolled at the Federal University of Technology, Akure, commonly known as FUTA, to study computer science. He left during his first year, convinced that he could learn what he needed about computers independently.
Still searching for a demanding field that suited his interest in solving complex problems, he later enrolled at Obafemi Awolowo University to study chemical engineering. His direction changed again in his first year, when another student introduced him to Java programming.
The encounter opened a world he had barely known while growing up: software, computing and the possibilities of the internet. Although chemical engineering remained his official course of study, programming soon became his main pursuit. He spent much of university teaching himself to code, experimenting with software and exploring unfamiliar areas of computing.
By his third year, he wanted to apply those skills to a real problem.
The Rise and Fall of Choice Polls
Working with a team of about eight people, Akinpelu developed Choice Polls, an electronic voting platform for university elections. It was designed to operate without continuous internet access, making it practical in an environment where connectivity was often unreliable.
Several departments adopted the system, and the project began generating revenue. It was Akinpelu’s first serious experience as a technology entrepreneur and gave the team confidence to think beyond departmental elections. They imagined serving student senates, other universities and perhaps, eventually, public institutions.
That ambition grew into Creators Hub, a broader initiative focused on digitising manual processes in Nigeria. The team explored products such as digital yearbooks and systems that could help universities and government institutions replace inefficient paper-based processes.
But the disputed election revealed that Choice Polls had not been prepared for the demands of a larger exercise. The team faced two problems. The first was scale: software that worked for a small department would not necessarily handle a much larger volume of users, transactions and data. The second was verifiability: without a sufficiently transparent and auditable record, the team could not quickly prove whether the discrepancy came from a technical failure or deliberate interference.
Choice Polls ended soon afterwards.
Akinpelu had previously turned down an offer from Terragon Group because he wanted to concentrate on his own company. After the venture failed, he reconsidered and accepted a software engineering role there. He began working professionally while completing his university studies, gaining experience with systems beyond those he had built for his startup.
Choice Polls was over, but the questions it raised stayed with him. He became determined to understand servers, system reliability and the engineering required to operate software at scale. He also recognised that technology could not solve every political or institutional problem by itself. Systems handling sensitive decisions had to work reliably, but they also had to generate records that people could independently inspect and trust.
Discovering Blockchain
In 2015, Akinpelu encountered blockchain technology and immediately saw a connection to elections.
A blockchain can provide a shared record of transactions that is difficult to alter without detection. Looking back at Choice Polls, he saw how such a record might have made the election more transparent and easier to audit.
Blockchain would not have corrected poor application design, inaccurate data or problems with voter identification. But it could have reduced dependence on the assurances of the system’s operator by giving independent parties evidence they could examine for themselves.
At the same time, Akinpelu’s interest in servers and scalable software was becoming professional expertise in DevOps and site reliability engineering. Those two interests – verifiable systems and dependable infrastructure – would eventually converge.
From Quidax to Blockchain Infrastructure
In 2017, Akinpelu was introduced to the team behind Quidax, then an early-stage cryptocurrency exchange. The company needed a DevOps engineer to establish and manage the infrastructure on which the exchange would run.
He joined as one of its early employees.
At the time, exchanges commonly operated their own infrastructure for every cryptocurrency they supported. Listing assets such as Bitcoin, Ethereum or XRP meant deploying and maintaining nodes for their respective blockchain networks.
Akinpelu was responsible for keeping those nodes and the surrounding systems online. Their reliability directly affected deposits, withdrawals and customers’ ability to use the exchange. This was his transition from thinking about blockchain as a possible solution for elections to operating critical infrastructure for a live cryptocurrency business.
His work later expanded across companies and networks, including Composable Finance, Polkadot and Flow. The underlying operational problems remained remarkably similar: nodes had to be deployed correctly, monitored continuously, maintained through upgrades and recovered quickly when they failed.
Supporting several networks made the inefficiency increasingly obvious. Rebuilding the deployment process for every node and every blockchain was slow, repetitive and difficult to scale. A standardised system could make the work faster, more dependable and easier to reproduce.
That was the first clear product opportunity behind Blockops.
Turning Repeated Work Into a Product
Akinpelu had also participated in a DevOps consulting company called Nostelos, which helped organisations, including banks, manage servers and other technical infrastructure. The business generated revenue, but its service model had a natural limit: each new customer demanded more time and direct effort from the team.
He wanted to build something that could serve more customers without requiring the company to repeat the same manual work for each one. The recurring demand for blockchain-node support offered a path forward.
Instead of deploying nodes individually for clients, Akinpelu began developing a platform through which developers and companies could deploy blockchain infrastructure more easily. The first version focused on Flow, the network he knew best. Support for Ethereum, Polkadot and other networks followed.
For a time, he continued working for other companies and used part of his salary to fund Blockops. The platform gradually expanded from node deployment into a wider set of tools for organisations that needed reliable blockchain infrastructure but did not want to build and operate everything internally.
The goal was straightforward: allow developers, protocols and businesses to use blockchain infrastructure without creating a separate internal platform for every network.
A Market in Transition
The cryptocurrency downturn tested that proposition. As speculative demand and funding declined, projects without sustainable products or clear users began to disappear.
But some blockchain applications continued to address tangible needs. Stablecoins, settlement systems and enterprise financial infrastructure were being used to move value, support remittances and create new financial products. Banks, fintech companies and other businesses were exploring the opportunity, even if many were unsure how to adopt the technology safely.
Blockops had already built much of the infrastructure these services required. The next question was how to make it usable by established institutions.
Rather than becoming a consumer-payments company, Blockops chose to help financial institutions add blockchain capabilities to the products they already offered. To understand what that would require, the team spoke with nearly 20 banks as well as several fintech companies.
The conversations revealed three consistent barriers.
The first was regulatory uncertainty. Institutions could see potential value in stablecoin payments and blockchain settlement, but many were reluctant to proceed without clearer rules.
The second was fragmentation. A company might need to integrate blockchain networks, wallet systems, custody providers, liquidity sources and compliance tools from several vendors. Doing so could require a specialist team, months of engineering work and substantial investment.
The third was control. Institutions did not simply need access to blockchain services; they needed approval policies, custody options, transaction monitoring, audit trails and a reliable way to reconcile activity across wallets, providers and networks.
Most already had established systems, processes and customer-facing applications. They wanted blockchain functionality to fit into that infrastructure, not force them to replace it.
Introducing Onstacks
Blockops responded by repackaging infrastructure it had already developed and making it available through APIs, allowing financial institutions to add blockchain services to their existing applications without building the underlying systems themselves.
That evolution led to Onstacks, Blockops’ enterprise platform for wallet control, liquidity coordination and transaction execution.
Through Onstacks, banks, fintech companies and other enterprises can develop services such as stablecoin payments, tokenisation, remittances and blockchain-based yield products. Instead of separately integrating wallets, blockchain networks, liquidity providers, payout partners, policy systems and reconciliation tools, they can reach those capabilities through one platform.
Its central proposition is not simply that several APIs are available in one place. Onstacks aims to provide a consistent control layer across different wallets, networks, liquidity providers and payout partners. An institution can change or combine underlying providers without rebuilding its customer-facing product every time.
The intention is for the blockchain infrastructure to operate quietly in the background. Customers should not need to understand nodes, network environments or token standards, while financial institutions should not need to assemble large blockchain engineering teams simply to test and launch a product.
Building From Nigeria
Building a global blockchain infrastructure company from Nigeria has brought challenges beyond product development. One of the earliest was trust.
African founders – particularly those working in cryptocurrency – often face greater scrutiny from international investors, partners and customers. Nigerian teams may be expected to demonstrate a functioning product and clear demand before serious funding conversations begin.
Regulatory unpredictability creates an additional risk. Blockchain companies must consider not only their technology and customers but also how sudden government decisions might affect their founders, employees and operations. For Blockops, that has meant establishing strong legal foundations and structuring the company carefully so it can remain compliant while protecting itself from unexpected disruption.
The environment has also imposed discipline. Blockops has had to remain capital-efficient, listen closely to paying customers and demonstrate the product through consistent execution.
Nigeria’s growing Web3 ecosystem has provided some support. Initiatives such as Web3Bridge have trained developers and created routes into the industry, while communities such as Builders Connect have given founders and developers places to exchange ideas. For Akinpelu, however, some of the most useful support has come from a small circle of friends who understand the pressures of building a company. They discuss their frustrations, share their difficulties and then return to the work.
Resilience as an Advantage
When Akinpelu reflects on Blockops’ progress, he returns to one quality: resilience.
There were many moments when closing the company would have been easier. Building it demanded personal sacrifice, and at one stage he went into debt to keep it operating. Continuing through those periods convinced him that he was not pursuing blockchain simply because it was fashionable. The technology, the problem and the long-term opportunity mattered enough to persist when the market became difficult.
The path to Blockops began with a failed university voting system, an accusation of manipulation and a young developer’s determination to understand why software breaks under pressure. It continued through servers, blockchain nodes, cryptocurrency exchanges and infrastructure for global Web3 networks.
Today, Akinpelu and Blockops are applying those lessons to a different but related problem: helping banks and fintech companies connect to blockchain-based finance without rebuilding their technology from the ground up.
The disputed election showed Akinpelu what happens when a critical system cannot produce evidence people trust. Every stage since – from technical failures and funding pressures to regulatory uncertainty – has reinforced the same principle: infrastructure earns trust not merely by working, but by remaining reliable, transparent and accountable when the stakes are highest.
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