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Njoku Emmanuel / Image source: TechCabal

Emmanuel Njoku, founder and CEO of now-defunct startup Lazerpay, now works as a business developer for Intmax, NODO can independently verify. This comes barely three months after Lazerpay’s shutdown, an experience the 21-year-old describes as one of the most traumatizing experiences in his career. “I’ve known Intmax for quite a while now,” Njoku said, “But I recently came on board to help build and drive adoption of their wallet product.”

Njoku’s wiz is not foreign to anyone that’s followed African tech in the past few years. His work at Lazerpay, a startup that enabled crypto payments for African businesses, is well famed: over 800 businesses integrated Lazerpay’s product, including global marketplaces like Shopify. But the short-lived hope of being the crypto-powered Stripe for Africa was marred by harsh regulatory conditions in Nigeria, where crypto is still outlawed by the federal government.

Now. Njoku, who has shared that he turned down a $300,000 job offer to start Lazerpay, will now push the growth of Intmax’s wallet product in Africa. “This wallet is the most secure product you’ll find anywhere,” he said on a live demonstration at the just concluded Web3 Lagos Conference. “Unlike other wallets, we don’t leave the security to the hands of users. We have built world-class biometric technology to make sure the wallet is one of the safest anywhere.”

Njoku’s bounce back into the web3 development space highlights the resilience of the Lazerpay Chief, who was at the centre of an online storm following the closure of his former company. “I got depressed at some point,” he shared in Flip Africa’s podcast earlier in May. But a spirited Njoku spoke to me last week with the conviction that I’ve seen to be common with founders. “Building is my thing; I’ll always have things in my pipeline,” he said.

The world will have to wait to see how Njoku, now armed with life lessons from a failed startup, approaches the tech entrepreneurship ecosystem yet again. In July, Njoku tweeted that he’d figured out a way to solve the issue with crypto cards being tightly connected to the banks, suggesting a crypto fintech product is somewhere in the making—or in the mind of the young builder. NODO could not verify this information, but it gives a glimmer of hope that the famed Njoku will be back to building Web3-powered solutions for the continent soon. Potentially after his time at Intmax.