The Central African Republic reportedly launched its own memecoin over the weekend. However, despite it being the world’s first nation-state memecoin and the first sovereign token on the Solana blockchain, all the launch managed to do was prove to the world that the country isn’t serious about communicating the truth about its crypto policies.
A Sunday tweet from President Faustin-Archange Touadéra announced the launch of CAR, calling the token “an experiment designed to show how something as simple as a meme can unite people, support national development, and put the Central African Republic on the world stage.”
Unfortunately, the launch gave the definite impression that it wasn’t supposed to be seen, much less understood, by the majority of the country.
For example, Touadéra launched CAR at midnight in the Central African Republic, the post was in English, not French, and the launch occurred during the US Super Bowl.
And as if that weren’t enough red flags, the last four characters in the post spelled out “pump.” The coin rallied to a market capitalization of $900 million before most Central African Republicans had even woken up, and proceeded to crash 90% throughout its first day.
By early Tuesday morning, it had halved again to under $40 million.
CAR rallied to a market cap of $900 million before most Central African Republicans had woken up.a
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Initial attempts to visit CAR’s official website, car.meme, produced a security warning in modern browsers, SSL certificates failed to load, and eventually, the website went offline entirely.
Then there’s the fact that the coin wasn’t denominated in the nation’s official currency, the CFA Franc. Moreover, there was no evidence that any bank or payment processor would accept CAR in the country.
Finally, when researchers asked SarumAI Agent if the coin was legitimate, it scored less than a 17% safety score with further notations that the top 10 holders held 84% of the supply.
Even crypto sleuth Coffeezilla couldn’t quite figure out if it was real. “Did a country just launch a memecoin?” He added the facepalm emoji and referred to CAR as an “obvious copy of the $TRUMP coin.”
In all, evidence suggests that Touadéra’s announcement of the world’s first sovereign memecoin lacked any sort of serious consideration.
However, the less-than-serious launch shouldn’t really come as a huge surprise. After all, the country has a history of releasing fake crypto news. This includes its supposed acceptance of bitcoin (BTC) as legal tender that never meaningfully occurred.
Indeed, the country put little to no effort into supporting BTC’s use as a means of payment. It never installed any significant quantity of BTC ATMs or point-of-sale terminals and eventually just dropped it from legal tender status.
