Empowering Entrepreneurship with Crypto

With a population of 1.4 billion people—and 40 percent under the age of 15—Africa possesses a huge untapped workforce, set to explode in the next decade. Already, it’s seeing a surge of young entrepreneurs setting up new businesses.

However, these ambitious professionals face a host of challenges amid the continent’s struggling financial infrastructure, with dozens of currencies beset by volatility, hyperinflation, and government corruption. Transferring money across national borders is difficult, and more than 60 percent of people in sub-Saharan Africa don’t have a bank account at all.

If there were a single, more stable, and trusted currency that could unite all Africans, it could revolutionize the continent’s economy, says social entrepreneur Lynn Liss, ’01. That’s exactly what she has set out to do with a new cryptocurrency called Akoin (AKN) that she cofounded with Akon, a Grammy-nominated performing artist and respected social entrepreneur.

“It’s all about empowering entrepreneurship, bringing people into the global economy through this currency, and creating massive opportunities,” Liss says.

Unlike better-known cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, which have massive swings in value driven by speculation, Akoin has been specifically designed as a more stable mode of exchange for smaller daily transactions, allowing for easy transfer in and out of other digital and state-based currencies and other forms of value. At the same time, it provides access to the kinds of transactions that businesses in countries with more developed financial institutions take for granted—all on a mobile phone. If Liss and Akon’s plan works, the new currency could help bring economic stability and opportunity to hundreds of millions of people.

Liss has the perfect combination of background and skills to set such an ambitious business in motion. In 1996, fresh out of high school, she worked at the startup Bank of Ann Arbor in Michigan, helping launch new financial products and set up the bank’s e-commerce platform well before e-commerce was the norm. Within two years, she landed a job as an executive consultant at Amsterdam-based BearingPoint Consulting, advising Fortune 500 companies on launching new technology products as they converted their operations to digital at the same time she was earning a Weekend MBA at Booth. “I was working with all the leading banks to deploy their cutting-edge technologies, and going to Booth on weekends,” she says.

With a new MBA in hand, she headed to California, where she helped launch a string of startups focusing on social impact, including Los Altos–based ICO Impact Group, which advised cryptocurrency companies on social impact initiatives, commonly referred to as “blockchain for good.” The experience led her in 2019 to meet Akon, a Senegalese American singer, songwriter, and record producer, who had worked with African governments to bring solar power to 14 countries. He was already thinking bigger, envisioning a “real-life Wakanda” in Senegal called Akon City that would run entirely on solar power and have its own currency, Akoin.