As a side note, if you want to avoid creating an ActorSystem (in case you're not actually using the actors part of Akka), you could just create an execution con

As a side note, if you want to avoid creating an ActorSystem (in case you're not actually using the actors part of Akka), you could just create an execution context manually: implicit val executionContext = ExecutionContexts.fromExecutorService(Executors.newCachedThreadPool())