Pryce Adade-Yebesi Prepares The World For A ‘New Internet Economy’ With His Company, Utopia Labs

In 2019, after working under an internship with Square Co-founder Jim McKelvey, a now 23-year-old man found what he wanted to do with his life.

According to AfroTech, Pryce Adade-Yebesi, the co-founder of Utopia Labs, was trying to figure out where to make the most impact on the lives of his people. Initially, he thought having a political career would be his calling, and he could make a difference. But something else made more sense.

“A lot of the areas that my mom took us to were areas that were very impoverished,” Adade-Yebesi said. “I saw that growing up, and for a while, I wanted to engage with politics, in government, but I started to see that it wasn’t quite the avenue in which I wanted to make an impact, and so I was interested in business and the potential things that I could build or make there.”

The fintech space was holding a door open for him to enter. Working at Square allowed him to learn that “fintech can change lives,” and he knew he wanted to “build something like Square one day.'”

Two years later, in 2021, he and his co-founders, Kaito Cunningham, Jason Chong, and Alexander Wu, laid the foundation for what bloomed into Utopia Labs. The company ended up being a startup intersecting traditional financing and cryptocurrency.

Adade-Yebesi and Utopia Labs are working toward the world accepting a “new internet economy.” Utopia Labs is entrenched in this by engaging services such as crypto payments and crypto treasury management.

“Our vision is to create a new internet economy. When value can pass so easily without so many middlemen and fragmented settlement systems, we have so many new opportunities to raise funds for causes people care about, start projects with people from all over the world that might end up being fantastic and powerful mechanisms for impact, but also can become billion-dollar companies,” Adade-Yebesi said. “Crypto enables so many interesting and novel ways of coordination and also just fixes so many of our fragmented value transfer systems and settlement systems across the world.”

This may reflect a better use for Adade-Yebesi and his talent than the world of politics.