A new memecoin seemingly launched by the president of the Central African Republic (CAR), Faustin-Archange Touadera, surged to a market cap of over $900 million over the weekend before wiping out over 75% of its value just as quickly.
On February 9 at midnight, CAR time, Touadera’s X account announced the launch of CAR, the country’s new memecoin. The president described it as “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 in a unique way.”
On the surface, CAR seemed like just another instance of a public figure cashing in on the ‘crypto FOMO,’ which, over the past year, has been increasingly more about hype than utility or value. After all, even the American president, Donald Trump, has cashed in, with his memecoin peaking at $15 billion in market cap, followed by an 80% dip in which over 200,000 investors collectively lost billions.
Touadera is no stranger to digital assets. In 2022, he enforced a new law that made BTC legal tender, following in the footsteps of El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele. A year later, he reversed the decision following strong backlash from local, regional, and global organizations. Touadera also launched a new local token, Sango, in 2022, but it also flopped.
Launching a new memecoin was, therefore, not out of character for Touadera.
In a separate post, he noted, “As the second president in the world to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender, I have always recognized the potential of crypto and its benefits on a global scale.”
Is CAR memecoin a $900M scam?
Despite its parabolic rise, many digital asset industry leaders started questioning the new project almost immediately as cracks started to show.
First, the project’s domain, car.meme, was registered just three days before the project launched, and as one virtual asset service provider (VASP) founder summed it up, “does not look like what a president or a country would do.”
Hours later, Namecheap, the domain registration service on whose platform the website operated, said it had “suspended the abusive service.” The website is offline at press time. The project’s X account was also taken down, but the presidential account claimed the government was working with the Elon Musk-owned company to restore it.
More cracks appeared. Touadera announced the project at 10:52 UTC, which is just minutes shy of midnight in the CAR, an unusual time to launch a new project that supposedly targets attracting investment into the country. With CAR being a French-speaking nation, the choice to only announce the launch in English was also suspicious.
Touadera’s account would later post a video of the president ‘officially launching’ the new project. “I invite you all to join us in celebrating this exciting new chapter,” he stated.
However, the video was flagged as fake and artificial intelligence (AI)-generated by deepfake detection tools.
The president’s office has yet to clarify whether the X account was hacked or if the project is legitimate. In the digital asset world, hacks are common, and attackers almost always promote fake memecoins once they take over social media accounts. In one mass hack in 2020, attackers took over the accounts of Bill Gates, Barack Obama, Elon Musk, Kanye West, and others to promote a ‘crypto’ scam.
Meanwhile, the CAR memecoin project is still active on Solana, with a $262 million market cap. At its peak of $900 million, it was worth 35% of CAR’s GDP, which stands at $2.6 billion.
Fake DRC President launches similar memecoin
Inspired by the CAR memecoin, another account posing as Félix Antoine Tshisekedi, the president of the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo, launched a similar memecoin on X.
The account, despite being fake, has been verified as a “government or multilateral organization.” The new memecoin it promoted peaked at $230,000 on Monday morning, but following a crackdown on X, which included most of the posts on the memecoin being taken down, it has collapsed.
Unlike CAR, the cracks with the DRC memecoin were more glaring. For starters, it had copied its promotional materials from CAR, including the tokenomics.
The DRC government has not made any statement distancing itself from the scam memecoin.
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