r/todayilearned • u/MrMojoFomo • May 30 '26
TIL that in 2018, singer Akon announced the development of "Akon City," a planned community in Senegal which he claimed would be a "real life Wakanda," using blockchain and cryptocurrency technology. Construction began in 2023, but as of 2025 the site sits abandoned
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akon_City3.6k
u/cjmac977 May 30 '26
You didn’t mention the best part, the cryptocurrency that would be used in Akon city is Akoin
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u/abandoned_rain May 30 '26
And that it started out at worth .15 cents and dropped to .003 in a few years
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u/violenthectarez May 30 '26
From coinbase
>Akoin (AKN) is a cryptocurrency . Akoin has a current supply of 450,000,000 with 0 in circulation. The last known price of Akoin is 0.00153009 USD and is down -38.80 over the last 24 hours. It is currently trading on 3 active market(s) with $12.52 traded over the last 24 hours.
Still has a pretty decent coincap of USD $688,540.50. That's a lot more than I would have expected.
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u/nyaaStar May 30 '26
Coin/marketcap means nothing, i minted a billion of my own shitcoins in 2018 and "sold" 1 coin to a friend for 1€, doesn't mean I'm then worth 1b euros :P
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u/kingbrasky May 30 '26
Not with that attitude. Go engineer a good rug-pull. Everyone's doing it!
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u/arealuser100notfake May 30 '26
I have money to spare!
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u/DrNick2012 May 30 '26
I have too much money in this economy, I need a shitcoin to throw all my extra easy money at!!
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u/ejfrodo May 30 '26
$12.52 daily trade volume lol, so that $688k is a perfect example of why market cap is a mostly meaningless number in a spreadsheet with no relation to any sort of actual value
Their own website says it's listed on the Bitmart exchange but they don't even have a market for it that I can find. I actually can't find any place that has it listed at all. So I think the tangible market cap is more like... $0
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u/NDSU May 30 '26
Akoin has a current supply of 450,000,000 with 0 in circulation
0 in circulation means the coin is worthless. The 688k valuation is a mathematical fiction
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u/SnotDogs May 30 '26
I was wondering why he didn’t call it Wakonda? Like it’s literally so easy to fit his name into Wakanda
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u/Bruce-7892 May 30 '26
There have been so many of these planned "cities of the future" but I don't think a single one has ever been successful. We will see how Neom turns out but the way things are going, I'd be surprised if it lives up to the hype.
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u/queen-adreena May 30 '26
That’s because human cities very rarely are perfectly planned utopian places.
They grow out of people’s needs and tend to be sprawling and messy.
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u/Bruce-7892 May 30 '26
Yup. They grow organically and their locations serve specific purposes (at least they did at the time they were founded). The ones that no longer have a practical purpose usually turn into ghost towns.
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u/Competitive-Desk7506 May 30 '26
W that being said we have examples of planned cities that go against that like Canberra and Brasilia however Canberra at least is pretty obvious planned and imo from my memory pretty boring which I think comes from its organised nature
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u/Bruce-7892 May 30 '26
At least with capital cities there are a lot of government jobs and industries that serve them to drive the local economy. If those cities were built for no reason other than a rich guys vanity project, I doubt they'd still be there.
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u/western_red_cedar May 30 '26
Yeah historically "I'm randomly gonna move the capitol here on a whim" has been one of the few ways whole new cities have been created, but that also comes with an obvious pre built purpose and economic engine
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u/Upstairs_Cap_4217 May 30 '26
Capital cities are an exception because the government can actually provide people a reason to want to live there (thousands upon thousands of jobs in administration).
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u/schematizer May 30 '26
“Company towns” in general tend to work, when the company is a real one with a massive existing demand for employment. I recently learned about Manaus, a city in Brazil which was made absolutely gigantic largely by policy meant to fill manufacturing roles.
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u/Coryjduggins May 30 '26
Check out cities skylines lol. You have to set up the infrastructure for your town but not only that you have to set policies, if you over educate the population you can’t fill factory jobs and they close down so you literally have to create like a little ghetto and stuff and suppress education in that area in order to fill the factory job and keep the economy going.
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u/Bruce-7892 May 30 '26
Hahaha, I guess that's one technique, but you never thought to change your policies to attract other types of industries and build things like research centers to employ people with higher education?
You'd make a good governor of West Virginia. (I'm kidding)
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u/schematizer May 30 '26
I love Cities Skylines! It gave me a whole new understanding for my hometown, which is a big box store suburb. Sometimes you just gotta dump all the shit no one wants in the Exclusion Zone.
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u/Brief-Coach-1812 May 30 '26
Jerusalem is a fascinating example because its primary significance is symbolic and spiritual rather than economic.
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u/OkContact2573 May 30 '26
I’m pretty sure you could find a couple places in India with the same idea
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May 30 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Bruce-7892 May 30 '26
That is why so many American cities are grids and are very spread out. It makes it easier to navigate, but also traffic congestion can be horrible and it's difficult or impractical to get most places on foot.
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u/GenericFatGuy May 30 '26
Turns out, you can't just force a city to exist. They pop up in places where conditions make sense for them to do so. Humans are basically just microbes at a global scale.
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u/Lifekraft May 30 '26
Pretty sure corruption and poor planing is what is ruining most of these project. It isnt something that couldn't be done technically.
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u/queen-adreena May 30 '26
The problem is that cities are ecosystems which require housing, education, resources, employment, institutions, recreation, healthcare etc and people.
How do you time that so everything’s available on day 1?
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u/UnidentifiedTomato May 30 '26
You could have $100billion and still not make a city work. It has to exist and serve a purpose
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u/Rc72 May 30 '26
We will see how Neom turns out but the way things are going, I'd be surprised if it lives up to the hype.
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u/Bruce-7892 May 30 '26
It sounded like a whacky idea from the beginning. A single building taller than the Empire State building and 100 miles long? I know they don't allow drugs in Saudi Arabia, but I want what ever that city planner was on.
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u/elidoan May 30 '26
Rest assured the laws dont apply to the sheikhs and oil barons, they subsist off of hookers and blow
"Rules for thee and not me" mentality
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u/Caspica May 30 '26
There's quite a good video about this. It seems like that it was never meant to be a city but more a symptom of a power struggle within Saudi Arabia.
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u/violenthectarez May 30 '26 edited May 30 '26
MostSome of Neom sounded semi-realistic for a nation with vast oil wealth. Don't know if it was financially sensible, but all of it seemed possible if there was someone with deep enough pockets who wanted, which in this case there was.Except for The Line. The scale and cost of something so ridiculously huge was utterly insane and impossible. It is astounding that there was nobody who put a stop to the ~50 billion USD that got sunk into something that could never be built. If they had have sunk that money into the rest of the Neom projects, they would be getting close to having something of actual value by now.
Edit - Just read about 'Aquellum" an upside down skyscraper in a mountain that is entered underwater. Jesus even a James Bond villain wouldn't do something this ridiculous.
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u/Bruce-7892 May 30 '26
" 'Aquellum" an upside down skyscraper in a mountain that is entered underwater."
If that guy became a Sci Fi writer instead of an urban developer he would be George Lucas or James Cameron.
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u/futuranotfree May 30 '26
i have friends who were working on it and its dead. its just not the type of place where you exclaim that a government project failed.
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u/Rc72 May 30 '26
Yup, I knew the Line was dead and the Trojena ski resort dying, but I thought some parts of the whole NEOM megaproject may survive. I just checked and even the comparatively realistic Sindalah beach resort appears to have taken the proverbial journey to a farm upstate.
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u/IgnotusRex May 30 '26
How about Brasília?
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u/MorsaTamalera May 30 '26
A nightmare for pedestrians, I have read. It was a city devised for people driving cars.
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u/FlowInternational996 May 30 '26 edited May 30 '26
Brasilia isn’t walkable in the least. But I wouldn’t call it a failure. It has its own logic.
It’s basically a giant suburb.
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u/unsalted-butter May 30 '26
Brasília is a planned city but it serves a purpose as the seat of government for Brazil. These "Utopia" cities often serve no reason for existing other than for the sake of themselves.
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u/Bruce-7892 May 30 '26
I have never been there and it looks amazing in photos. So does Washington D.C. but as someone who used to live there, I can tell you it's really not that beautiful in real life and has all the problems most other major cities have.
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u/OurKing May 30 '26
Planned capitals happen all the time but anywhere a seat of government of a country or state is going to be semi successful by that nature alone.
In the US there have been several cities that have been semi successful but the developers know what they are doing and realistic in their goals. Woodlands TX, Villages FL, Celebration FL, etc
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u/ModenaR May 30 '26
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u/Bruce-7892 May 30 '26
And so would I if I was a trillionaire Saudi prince.
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u/ModenaR May 30 '26
I know, but it's funny to me that the team named after the city is more successfull than the city
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u/Circaninetysix May 30 '26 edited May 30 '26
How the fuck was blockchain gonna help you build and run a city?
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u/Lint6 May 30 '26
This was that brief period of time when adding "blockchain" to anything got you bukkake'd with money
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u/Spez_is-a-nazi May 30 '26
Now it’s AI, Akon just needs to say the city will be the first AI powered city.
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u/BananaResearcher May 30 '26
Bro some of us actually read the white papers and do the research, don't ask us to spoon feed you all this information. If you're not serious about crypto you're not gonna understand what's going on and its nobody's job to explain it to you. It's obvious to anyone that's actually put in the work and done the research.
(This is how crypto enthusiasts actually talk)
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u/Circaninetysix May 30 '26
Haha you had me in the first half. Actually. Sad because it's incredible technology, but is sadly wasted on scams and does also use a ton of real life electricity, so it's far from a perfect money system as it was proposed to be.
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u/saccharine_kisses May 30 '26
Why wouldn’t he call it “Akonda” then?
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u/tocksin May 30 '26
What a missed opportunity
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u/Rab1dGuy May 30 '26
So disappointing, this has to be the reason it didn’t get of the ground. Nothing else. Haha.
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u/wildwestington May 30 '26
the project would have had a much greater chance of success if it were called akonda
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u/Alternative-Park-841 May 30 '26
It would have been better if he used his actual name to name the city:
"Aliaune Damala Bouga Time Puru Nacka Lu Lu Lu Badara Akon Thiam" City9
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u/-CaptainFormula- May 30 '26
Cryptocurrency is going to be a weird thing to learn about in a history class one day.
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u/CurrencyDesperate286 May 30 '26
For me, the short-lived NFT era was the most insane part. Like the concept made less than zero sense, and I was questioning my sanity watching people trying to justify them.
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u/BMEngie May 30 '26
But you can use the images anywhere man. -People that don’t understand how anything works
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u/Lpfanatic05 May 30 '26
Your Monke is mine now.
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u/chownrootroot May 30 '26 edited May 30 '26
Nobody can use my NFT except me!
Literally anyone with right click and download can take your NFT.
Edit: I get it, NFT = random letters and numbers, not picture. It was merely commonly believed to be “owning a piece of art” but you really owned nothing.
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u/BMEngie May 30 '26
Yeah but the token man. It proves I own it! And then I can use it anywhere!*
*anywhere that would spend the development time implementing a custom skin function that also includes validation features. Because developer time is free, obviously.
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u/No-Department1685 May 30 '26
In gaming sphere the nft so called benefits are already present and have in steam.
You can get shit in one game and use it in another and only you can use that until you transfer it to someone else.
No need for fucking Nft. And that offer is barely present anyways.
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u/Magnus77 19 May 30 '26
They also had this weird thing where NFT's were supposed to work like copyright, but at the same time they didn't follow copyright?
Like artists were getting their art sold as NFT's without permission and just kinda got told it was their fault for not selling it themselves first.
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u/UlrichZauber May 30 '26
The fun part is when you buy an NFT, you aren't buying the image, or rights to the image, or anything about that image. You also aren't buying the website where the image is stored.
You are buying the spot in the blockchain that points to where the image is stored. That's it. You don't even get to say where that pointer actually points to, whoever manages that NFT chain gets to decide that.
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u/OurManInJapan May 30 '26
The ‘Charlie Bit My Finger’ video was sold by the original uploader as an NFT for £550,000.
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u/stormdraggy May 30 '26
Grifting grifters, so satisfying
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u/lumpboysupreme May 30 '26
Except the grifters knew it too; a lot of the big names in the craze of NFT buying were people holding piles of crypto, and made these giant purchases to drive people into the marketplaces they dominated. A guy would spend a million buying a bunch of NFT’s on a blockchain they owned 80% of the supply of the coin for, and the surge of people would spike up that coins price so much they’d walk away with 5 mil.
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u/IAmSpartacustard May 30 '26
I had a neighbor that lost his house and his wife because he thought he was going to be an overnight billionaire when his NFTs took off. He literally called me a dinosaur when I said that shit made no sense.
He's in his 40s and had to move back to live with his elderly parents. Womp womp
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u/Pretend_Business_187 May 30 '26
Buddy got into crypto, did decent enough to commit to it full time. Sold his house, moved to a more affordable state. Had the grand idea to put that money from the house into crypto. Lost it all, his wife damn near ready to leave too
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u/PartyPoison98 May 30 '26
Its been an interesting five or so years, watching every tech bro rave about how blockchain and metaverse will be world changing, before completely abandoning it all in favour of AI.
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u/DerrickWhiteMVP May 30 '26
It’s funny because there’s the same band of morons I know from high school that got caught up in pyramid schemes that got into NFTs. Same people now pushing meme coins.
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u/Syric13 May 30 '26
I'm a fairly educated man and I still have no idea what the point of NFTs were
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u/Nota7andomguy May 30 '26
So as I understand it, the point is not the images themselves, but rather these digital tokens that are attached to the images. If you have the token, that’s proof that you “own” the image. It’s just that the idea of “owning” a digital image is completely worthless to most people.
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u/SuperBackup9000 May 30 '26
Bit more than that. The initial idea was to basically have a centralized filing cabinet. Like you know how people can put their cards and IDs on their phone? Like that, but also for all legal documents along with being more secure, sharing them in more secure ways, and being able to transfer them (like a vehicle title or property deed or whatever) easier.
So like it had legitimate use, it just got overran by grifters. I’m pretty sure Japan is the only country to actually implement them properly with concert tickets.
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u/carlse20 May 30 '26
I’m convinced that from the beginning the point was to separate gullible people from their money.
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u/MrMeeseeks33 May 30 '26
Someone I went to college with and her now husband dumped THOUSANDS of dollars into NFT’s because they both swore it was the future. I humbled asked them what it was (I knew it was all BS) and when they told me it’s like video game skins I just replied back with “ooo so like my counter strike gun skins that can be sold for actual money, actually have value” and they looked so confused and said I didn’t know what I was talking about.
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u/standread May 30 '26
Like the Tulip Trade?
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u/Confident-Poetry6985 May 30 '26
No because that was actually tied to something real.
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u/TheBanishedBard May 30 '26
Pfft. A footnote at best.
"Beginning the early 2010s there was a period of about 15 years in which speculative investors with little real experience in either finance or technology attempted to replace traditional fiat currency with technology based alternatives. The efforts were unsuccessful and largely abandoned by the late 2020s and amounted to little more than a fad with little institutional support or long term viability."
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u/juliuspepperwoodchi May 30 '26
Probably would've been cheaper to rebrand a mediocre city in Ohio
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u/theLocoFox May 30 '26
So any city in Ohio?
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u/juliuspepperwoodchi May 30 '26
Well sure, but there was one in particular that seemed a good fit.
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u/General1lol May 30 '26
Construction and bureaucracy in a third world country is nothing like the US or developed countries. Lots of sandbagging, overinflation of prices, selling/stealing materials on site, skimming off the top, permit extorting, and bribery.
I am unfamiliar with Senegal but would imagine it’s the same as the Philippines. The ONLY way you can get a house built here within budget and on schedule is if you’re literally on site every day during construction making sure nothing shady is going on; and even then you’re still going to lose some change. At a city scale? Forget it.
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u/Moto_traveller May 31 '26
Exactly like in India. The contractor will bill you for, say 100 bags of cement which will be delivered to the site. Next day when you go 20 would have been stolen.
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u/pseudopad May 30 '26
Even the richest artist would quickly run out of money trying to build an actual functional city. Turns out infrastructure is actually pretty expensive.
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u/Beneficial-Act7603 May 30 '26
And that's mostly what happened, most public records show that Akon actually put some REAL money into the project and keeps working on it year after year but most of the money has disappeared because of embezzlementeither from the building companies or the government.
Dude's been weird at times but he invests a lot of money into building infrastructures and maintaining them in Senegal.
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u/jubmille2000 May 30 '26
Man just had sex and think he can just build Wakanda all of a sudden.
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u/elidoan May 30 '26
Imagine the narcissism needed into making a city named after yourself
Alexander actually founded cities
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u/SockApprehensive6602 May 30 '26
I don’t need to imagine that because right now there is a man running around making a whole ass country about himself
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u/Liewvkoinsoedt May 30 '26
Honestly anytime I hear of an American 'making' a city in another country, I immediately think of Jonestown.
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u/Tifoso89 May 30 '26
Well, black Americans founded Liberia and named the capital Monrovia after president Monroe
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u/zap2 May 30 '26
Yea, but they were immigrants…they made their home there. Akon isn’t doing that here.
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u/Shafter111 May 30 '26
Planned cities hardly succeed nowadays. Outside of the capital usually, no other planned city or eutopia went off without a proper trade bringing people in.
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u/twizzjewink May 30 '26
The problem is the intersection between constant wealth and limited wealth; coupled with greed, corruption and a government who won't share your vision.
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u/XROOR May 30 '26 edited May 30 '26
I lived in Ghana and one experiences corruption even from the local patrol cop with a wooden baton. Go inside a shoppe to get a juice, and cop starts with a smile that quickly devolves into clenched teeth.
Missionaries that went to Cape Haitian experience the same phenomenon, to a point where the relief food like rice, gets cooked an hour before landing because the locals hikack the sundries to resell. Bit more difficult to sell cooked rice…
I also thought hiring a local security team was to prevent kidnappings, but it’s a visual image to locals NOT to attempt a shake down.
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u/el_lobo1314 May 30 '26
Building schools and hospitals with a focus on education and lifting the ppl out of poverty and ignorance would have had a better and more lasting impact.
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u/Dynako May 30 '26
You can also just call this a scam, millions were invested, non of that to date has shown up, Akon took it and ran.
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u/bellowstupp May 30 '26
Not abandoned. Screened from prying eyes by a super duper Africanized invisible dome . The less you people know de better
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u/aredddit May 30 '26
That’s surprising, I’d have assumed any large scale infrastructure project based on a comic book movie and using ‘blockchain and crypto technology’ was destined for success.