Akropoli was founded in 2017 by Ana Andrianova, with Kate Kurbanova joining later as a co-founder.

Prior to starting Akropolis and serving as its CEO, Andrianova co-founded and was managing director of Apiro Capital, a data- and technology-driven investment management firm, in addition to founding private equity advisory firm Sirin Capital. She has additional investment experience from serving as a fund manager for the Lehman Brothers and an emerging markets hedge fund analyst for Emergent Asset Management, where she was responsible for private equity fund strategy. In addition, Kurbanova has served as an advisor for The Bee Token, the Web3 Foundation, Tenzorum and OpenMaker.

Kurbanova first began with Akropolis in January 2018 as an advisor and was officially brought on as a full-time employee in June 2018, recognized for her contribution to the project by being named its co-founder. Prior to Akropolis, Kurbanova was head of analytics at crypto-asset intelligence company Cindicator, where she developed research tools and methodologies as well as co-authored the company's CND token model and white paper. She has also served as a community and product advisor for Svandis.

Akropolis was conceived as a distributed savings and pensions fund — a solution to what it described in its initial announcement as ""a looming pension deficit apocalypse"" resulting from the inevitable collapse of state pensions systems. But in August 2020, the company stated that it had shifted its focus to building the underlying framework for such a system by creating AkropolisOS to allow for the rapid launch of for-profit capital pools.

AkropolisOS is a Solidity-based, modular framework for the creation and management of distributed capital pools and serves as the base for the company's Sparta and Delphi platforms, with the former providing access to uncollateralized loans. Akropolis has claimed that unlike other DeFi protocols, its products reduce the risk associated with these loans by providing community incentives in the form of AKRO to those who provide accurate risk assessments.

The company provided some insight into its business model in December 2018, reporting that it would focus on building a pipeline of institutional partners and clients, developing technology and academic partnerships, and building out the Akropolis ecosystem. It also holds a significant number of AKRO to be used for internal operations such as marketing and partnership building.

Akropolis has a fixed maximum supply of 4 billion AKRO tokens. The company carried out two initial private token presales between January 2018 and June 2018. The first round was for investors, advisors and strategic partners, while the second was for active community members. The two sales combined represent 22.5% of the total token supply, and the AKRO sold was locked up for two months following its public sale, vesting monthly for another 12 months.

460 million AKRO — 11.5% of the total supply — was released to form the initial circulating supply once the token was listed publicly on cryptocurrency exchange Huobi Global in July 2019, with 8% going to the exchange and 3.5% going to the company. All additional AKRO was subject to lock-up periods following its public listing on the exchange. 9.5% was reserved for team members and advisors, with a one-year lock-up and vesting monthly for 12 months — later extended to January 2021; 14% for marketing and community initiatives, with a two-month lock up and vesting 2%, 1.5%, 1%, 2.5%, 4% and 3% of the total supply each month, respectively; and an additional 42.5% for the company, with 40.5% having a one-year lock-up and vesting monthly over two years, and 0.5%, 0.5% and 1% of the total token supply being unlocked after 90, 120 and 180 days, respectively.

Updates to Akropolis' vesting schedules are made publicly available on an online spreadsheet.

The Akropolis suite of products utilizes a governance token, AKRO, to help secure its protocol. As an ERC-20 token, AKRO transactions rely on the Ethereum blockchain's proof-of-work consensus algorithm to validate any on-chain records. With a PoW consensus, miners compete among each other to add new blocks to the blockchain, and a majority of all nodes in the network must confirm a record for it to be posted.

In August 2019, the smart contracts for AKRO were audited by blockchain security firm CertiK. The company found that the smart contracts — after Akropolis implemented some suggested changes — were ""structurally sound and not vulnerable to any classically known anti-patterns or security issues.""

In August 2020, Akropolis reported that there had been several attempted, but unsuccessful, hacks of its smart contracts. As a result, it moved all unlocked ARKO still in smart contracts to custodial wallets with higher-grade, institutional security. Later that month, it announced a bug bounty program, with rewards paid in AKRO or stablecoins to those who report a previously undiscovered security flaw.

AKRO was first listed on Huobi Global, but it is now available for purchase on a number of major exchanges, including Binance, MXC.COM, KuCoin and Uniswap (V2). AKRO can be traded against fiat currencies such as the U.S. dollar, cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) and stablecoins such as Tether (USDT) and USD Coin (USDC)

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