👨🏿‍🚀 Daily – LemFi’s infinite market glitch |

Mark Irozuru is a DevOps Engineer with years of experience designing, automating, and scaling infrastructure for blockchain and Web3 systems. Currently the DevOps Lead at Botanix Labs, a Bitcoin-based blockchain company, he builds reliable systems that power Bitcoin’s evolution as a global currency.

• Explain your job to a 5-year-old.

Imagine you have a big Lego castle that you want your friends to play with every day, you’re like the castle keeper who has special jobs: the builder helper and the castle doctor. 

When your friends build new rooms or additions to the tower for the castle, you help them add those pieces really quickly and safely. You make sure the pieces fit accordingly and do not disrupt the original state of the castle. You have those tools that make adding new stuff easy and super fast. In addition to all these, you watch the castle every day and night to make sure it never collapses or falls over. 

Whenever there’s an issue with the castle, you fix it right away, and you make sure lots of your friends have a nice experience playing with the castle at the same time without it breaking.

• What’s the hardest thing about building a blockchain infrastructure and keeping it reliable?

Things can fail in unpredictable ways, not just crashing. Most infrastructure work is “make it fast and keep it up.” Blockchain infrastructure is “make it perfect, provably secure, and don’t break the chain’s history, and also keep it fast and always up.”

In blockchain, you can’t just rely on one server or one database like in traditional systems; everything has to work across many nodes.

• What’s one mistake engineers make too often when building for scale? 

I think a common mistake in the industry when building for scale is over-optimising in the early stages. They focus on complex, scalable solutions before understanding the actual needs of the workload. This just leads to early crazy complexity, increased developer time, and high maintenance costs.

• If you could redesign one thing about Bitcoin, what would it be?

I’ll try to simplify UTXO management. In essence, I’ll keep the UTXOs at the protocol level but give developers APIs that don’t require a PhD in Bitcoin internals to build reliable systems.

• What’s the most underrated DevOps tool you swear by?

Costgraph.

• You led a team from Bournemouth University to victory at Ocean Hackathon, what did that win teach you about teamwork?

It taught me that teamwork is essential to progress. 

At Ocean Hackathon, we had limited time, diverse skill sets, and a complex challenge. What made the difference wasn’t just technical skill; it was clear communication, mutual respect, and quickly figuring out who should own what.

We didn’t try to do everything ourselves. We trusted each other to deliver, and we kept the goal focused and straightforward. That experience reminded me that great teamwork isn’t about having all the answers; it’s about creating an environment where the best ideas can surface and move fast.

• What’s the best part about working in Web3 right now?

The flexibility of remote work and working in progressive tech. The best part is knowing you’re building the future, and it’s still early enough to shape it.

In Web3, the rules aren’t all written yet. That means there’s room to innovate, experiment, and push boundaries in ways you just can’t in more mature industries. Whether it’s scaling Bitcoin infrastructure or rethinking financial access, you’re not just following trends, you’re helping define them.

Read the full interview with Mark here.

LemFi, the Nigerian-born remittance fintech startup, has launched a new “Send Now, Pay ” service that allows immigrants in the UK to send money home even before payday. Think of it as a way to borrow instantly within the LemFi app and make transfers right away. For many African immigrants who send money home regularly, this could be a real lifeline in moments of financial pressure.

State of play: This move follows LemFi’s acquisition of Pillar, a UK credit card startup built to help immigrants establish credit history, in June. Through Pillar, LemFi can access credit data and the tools to assess repayment behaviour. Pillar’s card already reports payments to credit bureaus, so users can build a record that LemFi can later use to decide borrowing limits inside the app.

Between the lines: LemFi says it is also using AI to underwrite credit, meaning the system can adjust borrowing limits and repayment terms based on how people actually use the product. It could help manage credit defaults, though the risk is always there. One likely safeguard is tying repayment directly to a user’s credit card or app balance to make it harder to skip payments.

Infinite market glitch: Beyond the UK, LemFi can test this product across Europe. Its January acquisition of Bureau Buttercrane gave the remittance fintech a payments licence that covers the wider European Economic Area (EEA) region. With that, LemFi isn’t just adding a feature. It’s laying the groundwork for a new kind of financial service for the diaspora.

Africa’s most liquid stock exchange is getting new leadership. Valdene Reddy, head of capital markets at the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE), will resume as CEO on April 1, 2026. She brings over two decades of financial market experience, including stints at international investment banks, and over ten years within the JSE itself.

Between the lines: Reddy’s appointment follows the planned retirement of Leila Fourie, who led the bourse for over six years. During Fourie’s tenure, the JSE modernised its core tech infrastructure, revamped regulatory and listing rules, introduced new segments such as sustainability-ETFs and a voluntary carbon market, diversified revenue beyond equity trading, and increased inclusivity and governance reforms. The exchange also signed memorandums to foster dual-listing arrangements to attract broader capital flows.

Yet the market faces headwinds. The number of listed companies has fallen from about 770 three decades ago to 331 today, with more than 50 delistings in the last two years. Retail giant Massmart delisted from the bourse after being acquired by Walmart in 2022.

Zoom out: The big question now is why companies are choosing to leave public markets, rather than staying or listing. Is it pressure of scrutiny, reporting burdens, more attractive private or offshore options, or simply raising capital more effectively elsewhere? Under Reddy, the JSE’s focus might shift from reforming what exists to rebuilding what’s been lost, making listing once again an attractive proposition for companies.

Maziv, the fibre network operator partly owned by Vodacom, is gearing up for a massive expansion that could take on one of South Africa’s biggest digital bottlenecks. The company wants to connect more than 8,000 mobile towers that still depend on outdated microwave links, which have caused the slowing of internet speeds in many parts of the country.

How would they do this? Through its subsidiary, Dark Fibre Africa (DFA), Maziv plans to extend fibre lines deep into regions still lacking high-speed connectivity. The goal is to replace slow, congestion-prone microwave backhaul systems with reliable fibre connections that can support the country’s growing mobile and data demands.

No small feat. Rolling out infrastructure in remote areas comes with logistical and financial hurdles. For Maziv to pull it off, it will need to double DFA’s existing footprint (35,000km of new fibre cable) to reach the remaining towers.

Still, the payoff could be huge. Fibre-linked towers mean faster and more stable mobile networks for people in under-connected regions. If it succeeds, Maziv, with Vodacom at its side, will have laid the tracks for the country’s next leap in connectivity.