The Central African Republic’s crypto projects — from Sango Coin to CAR meme coin — are riddled with red flags, says GI-TOC. The report cites opacity, poor design, and risks of money laundering and foreign exploitation.

The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC) has published a report warning that the Central African Republic’s recent crypto initiatives – notably Sango Coin and the $CAR meme coin – are opaque, poorly designed, and expose the country to money laundering, elite capture, and foreign exploitation. Launched under President Faustin-Archange Touadéra, these projects were promoted as tools for development, financial inclusion, and modernization, but the report concludes they function mainly as speculative schemes benefiting a narrow circle of insiders while weakening state oversight of land and natural resources. Since 2022 the CAR has pursued an aggressive crypto agenda: briefly making bitcoin legal tender, creating a national token (Sango Coin) marketed with promises of e-residency, access to land, and investment in mining and forestry, and later launching the highly speculative $CAR meme coin in early 2025. GI-TOC documents that Sango Coin failed to meet its fundraising goals and that many flagship promises – such as a “Crypto City” and “Crypto Island” – never materialized, while legislative changes enabled tokenization of land and natural resources through poorly regulated platforms. The $CAR token, heavily promoted online, showed extreme volatility, technical irregularities, and opaque governance, including links to speculative land tokenization with limited safeguards against abuse. According to the report, these ventures have unfolded in a context of extreme institutional fragility: limited electricity and internet access, ongoing armed violence, and deep poverty make genuine citizen participation in crypto markets unrealistic, concentrating any benefits in political and business elites. GI-TOC and related analysis warn that the opacity of these schemes raises the risk that foreign private actors and shadow networks – including individuals previously linked to fraud or resource trafficking – could use CAR’s crypto channels for money laundering, sanctions evasion, and extraction of strategic resources, potentially undermining the country’s fiscal integrity and long‑term sovereignty.

✨ AI-generated background, compiled from web sources — not editorial content.

More coverage

• Central African Republic: Crypto Experiments, State Capture Risks ... (africansecurityanalysis.org)
• Cryptocurrency and criminal capture in the Central African Republic (globalinitiative.net)
• Opaque crypto schemes endanger Central African Republic state ... (wiky.com)
• Central African Republic: Selected Issues in - IMF eLibrary (elibrary.imf.org)

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