From Promise to Collapse: The State of Akoin in 2025
In January 2023, I wrote a blog post called Save Akoin, suggesting to the Akoin team, and Akon himself, concrete steps to rescue what was once a visionary project. A Stellar-based cryptocurrency designed to empower African entrepreneurs through a decentralized financial ecosystem. That post was written not as an attack, but as a roadmap. At that point, I still believed Akoin could be saved.
But two years later, it’s time to face reality. As of mid-2025, Akoin has not just failed to live up to its original vision, it has collapsed completely. The project is effectively dead, the numbers and facts painting a picture of a token project gone horribly wrong.
This update covers what has happened to Akoin since January 2023: the loss of its flagship use case, the obliteration of its market value, the collapse of investor trust, and the reputational fallout for its founder. It sets the stage for a future conversation about whether Akoin can be salvaged, but first, we must understand the scale of the failure.
The Collapse of Akon City: From Crypto Utopia to Abandoned Grassland
When Akoin launched, it was positioned as the lifeblood of Akon City, a $6 billion “futuristic city” planned for Senegal that would run entirely on blockchain technology and renewable energy. The reality is that, by 2025, Akon City no longer exists.
Despite being announced in 2018 and promoted with bold visuals of sci-fi skyscrapers and Akoin-branded ATMs, the project broke no meaningful ground. Five years after a ceremonial groundbreaking, the site in Mbodiène remained largely empty, just grassland and a single, unfinished welcome center with no roads, no power, and no infrastructure.
By 2024, the Senegalese government had lost patience. In mid-2024, Akon was issued an ultimatum to begin real development or lose the land. When the deadline passed without progress, the government reclaimed most of the site in 2025 and publicly declared the Akon City project “over.” Officials announced plans to move forward with a more conventional $1.2 billion development without Akon at the helm.
Although Akon retains a small parcel of the land (about 8 hectares), the grand experiment is finished. No hospital, no university, no solar power grid. No city. And no economic engine for Akoin.
Akon’s similar project in Uganda, announced in 2021, has also failed to materialize, stalled by disputes with local residents and a lack of visible progress.
Akoin Market in 2025: Price, Liquidity, and Utility
The failure of Akon City has been mirrored, almost perfectly, in the collapse of Akoin (AKN) itself.
In January 2023, Akoin traded around $0.016 to $0.02, already down more than 90% from its launch price in late 2020. By the end of 2023, the token had sunk to around $0.003, with brief lows near $0.0007. As of mid-2025, Akoin remains in fractions of a cent territory and has shown no signs of recovery.
Liquidity has evaporated. AKN has been delisted from nearly all exchanges, including BitMart. The token is now functionally untradeable, there are no active markets, no meaningful trading volume, and no buyer interest. Listings on CoinMarketCap and similar aggregators reflect a market cap of around $1.3 million, with near-zero daily activity.
No tokenomics changes have been announced. Akoin still officially exists as a Stellar-based token with a total supply of 450 million, but with no use case, no ecosystem, and no foundation activity. It has become a digital ghost town.
The features once promised on Akoin’s website, atomic swaps of mobile minutes, a digital marketplace, financial tools for African entrepreneurs, remain unfulfilled. There is no DApp marketplace. No working tools. No visible developer activity. No new roadmaps since 2021.
Public Sentiment and Investor Reactions
Across social media, forums, and YouTube, sentiment has turned from frustration to bitterness. Akoin is now widely cited as a textbook crypto failure, and Akon’s reputation has suffered along with it.
Some early investors say they were misled, citing the enormous gap between Akoin’s marketed vision and the actual results. One YouTuber accused Akon of stealing money from everyday people. Reddit threads are full of investors writing off their AKN holdings as total losses. Others point to the abandonment of Akon City as confirmation that the entire initiative was a mirage.
Official Akoin channels have mostly gone quiet. The project has not addressed the token’s delisting, the Senegalese government’s reclamation of land, or the total lack of liquidity. Akon has, on rare occasion, admitted to “mismanagement” of the project, but has not proposed a path forward. Public trust is gone.
Akon’s Legal and Reputational Fallout
In addition to Akoin’s collapse, Akon has faced several legal and regulatory challenges since 2023.
- In 2022, he was sued by former business partner Devyne Stephens, who alleged that Akon City and Akoin bore the hallmarks of a Ponzi scheme. While Akon denied wrongdoing, he quietly settled part of the unrelated lawsuit for $850,000, fueling speculation about internal problems with the project’s finances.
- In March 2023, Akon was charged by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for illegally promoting another crypto project (Tron/TRX) without disclosing compensation. Akon, along with several other celebrities, settled the charges and paid a financial penalty.
These incidents have eroded Akon’s credibility in the blockchain space. What was once seen as a bold entrepreneurial move had become a reputational liability. Even mainstream media outlets have run headlines about Akon’s “failed crypto city,” with some questioning whether the project was ever real to begin with.
A Moment of Reckoning
By every measurable standard, price, volume, ecosystem development, real-world adoption, and sentiment, Akoin is in ruins.
What began as a hopeful attempt to use cryptocurrency for economic justice has become another cautionary tale. It’s not just the price collapse or the dead marketplace. It’s the disconnect between the vision and the follow-through. The near-total lack of transparency. The absence of leadership at a critical moment.
For those who believed in Akoin’s mission, this is a moment of reckoning. But it is also a moment of clarity. Before we can talk about rebuilding or salvaging what remains, we must first acknowledge what has been lost.
This is not the end of the story, but is it the bottom?
A future post will explore whether anything can still be built from what’s left of Akoin, whether a community-led rescue is possible, or whether the token is destined to vanish entirely. But for now, this is the state of Akoin in 2025. A broken project, abandoned by its founder, delisted by exchanges, and remembered more for what it failed to do than for what it ever achieved.
Find out more about Akoin (AKN) on the Stellar DEX
Disclaimer: None of this is financial advice. Always do your own research (DYOR) before making any investment decisions. Cryptocurrencies involve significant risk, and any opinions shared are for informational purposes only.