👨🏿‍🚀 Daily – It’s here: The Builders’ List 2025 |

Justice Eziefule is the co-founder of Metastable Labs and one of the builders behind Liquid, a decentralised lending protocol for prediction markets. His path into tech has been shaped by bold career pivots: from walking away from a hairdressing apprenticeship at 19 to taking an unpaid internship at OlotuSquare instead of a traditional corporate placement. That choice led him to Rivers State Tech Creek, where he became an SQL instructor and set the foundation for a career defined by risk-taking and independent thinking.

• Explain your job to a five-year-old.

Imagine you have a big box of Lego, and you can build anything you want with it. My job is like that, but instead of Lego pieces, I use code to build things on phones and computers.

I also help run the team that decides what we should build, kind of like being the person who says, “Let’s go outside and play,” and then helps everyone choose teams and what game to play.

So I’m both someone who creates things and someone who leads the building of new ideas, making sure everything works so people can use it every day.

• What’s the hardest trade-off you’ve had to make while building a prediction-market lending protocol?

We originally built Liquid as an insurance product for prediction markets. After announcing it on X and spending weeks testing the math, we realized the economics were broken. High premiums were too expensive for traders, but lower premiums caused liquidity providers to lose money and created bad debt.

After a month of work, it was clear the model was unviable. However, during that process, we stumbled upon a way to solve the gap-risk problem that previously made leverage in prediction markets impossible. We chose to abandon our initial work and pivot toward this breakthrough. That decision formed the foundation for the lending layer Liquid is today.

• Prediction markets are still early in Africa; why do you think Liquid can scale when the underlying market is still building (early) momentum?

We designed Liquid for a global ecosystem, so our growth isn’t limited by the maturity of any single region. However, we see Africa—and Nigeria specifically—as a massive opportunity. Nigeria is already a top-five crypto market globally, and users here adopt new financial tools far more quickly than traditional markets expect.

Even though prediction markets are in their early stages, the behavior we see in Africa—comfort with volatility and familiarity with crypto primitives—makes the continent a natural early adopter base for us. By building for a global audience while leveraging a region that embraces innovation this rapidly, we can scale Liquid long before the broader market reaches traditional maturity.