The $6 billion Wakanda dream that became a single unfinished building

In 2018, American-Senegalese singer Akon announced he would build a "real-life Wakanda" — a Black Panther-inspired futuristic city on Senegal's coast worth $6 billion, complete with skyscrapers, its own cryptocurrency, and a fully digital economy. Seven years later, that dream has been reduced to a single unfinished building sitting on an empty 800-hectare plot of land.

How the Story Began

The city concept was born alongside the Akoin cryptocurrency, whose launch was originally slated for July 2018 — envisioned as a unified digital currency capable of tying together the economies of different African nations. On January 15, 2020, Akon officially announced Akon City, a planned community on the Atlantic coast near the village of Mbodiène, roughly 100 km south of Dakar, where Akoin was meant to serve as the central currency of the entire local economy. A symbolic groundbreaking ceremony followed on August 31, 2020, attended by Senegal's then-tourism minister, Alioune Sarr.

What Went Wrong

The project ran into trouble on multiple fronts at once. Akon was never able to raise the promised level of funding and repeatedly defaulted on payments owed to Senegal's tourism development agency, SAPCO, which oversaw the land allocation. The Central Bank of West African States explicitly declared the use of an alternative currency like Akoin illegal in the region. And the token itself kept losing value the entire time: from $0.15 at its 2020 launch to roughly $0.003 today — a drop of more than 98%. Akoin has since been delisted from every exchange where it was ever traded.

The Ultimatum and the Official Shutdown

In August 2024, SAPCO issued Akon a final ultimatum: begin actual construction immediately, or forfeit 90% of the allocated land. The project failed that test. In July 2025, SAPCO's head, Serigne Mamadou Mboup, confirmed to the BBC what observers had long suspected:

The Akon City project no longer exists. — Serigne Mamadou Mboup, head of the SAPCO tourism agency

By that point, the entire 800-hectare site had produced nothing beyond a partially built Welcome Center — no roads, no housing, no electricity grid. Some buyers of property and other stakes in the project have already received refunds, the official Akon City website has been taken down, and Akon himself has said he will no longer accept crypto-related requests on the celebrity-message platform Cameo.

What's Left of the Idea

In place of a megacity spanning 800 hectares, SAPCO has announced a far more modest replacement: a roughly $1–1.2 billion tourism hub on just eight hectares of land, funded by private investors — with hotels, apartments, a marina, and a promenade, but without the cryptocurrency, the skyscrapers, or the ambition to build a city of the future from scratch.

Why This Story Matters

Akon City became one of the most visible examples of how loud media rhetoric around blockchain and "cities of the future" can persist for years, disconnected from the actual engineering and financial discipline such megaprojects require. Tellingly, a similar idea — building a self-sufficient modern city on Africa's coast — is now being pursued by actor Idris Elba on Sherbro Island in Sierra Leone, but without tying it to a proprietary cryptocurrency, and with a focus on concrete infrastructure instead: solar and wind power generation, special economic zone status, and gradual, phased construction. Whether he manages to avoid Akon City's fate remains to be seen — but the Senegalese project's story stands as a reminder that skyscraper renderings and a nicely-branded token don't build a city on their own.

This material is for informational purposes only and is not investment advice.