Is crypto legal in Central African Republic? Regulation & rules (2026)

CAR's Law No. 22.004 of 22 April 2022 made Bitcoin legal tender (the world's second such adoption). Parliament unanimously amended it on 23 March 2023, stripping Bitcoin of legal-tender status and replacing the mandatory-acceptance obligation with voluntary acceptance only.

COBAC Decision D-2022/071 of 6 May 2022 prohibits all regulated entities (banks, microfinance institutions, payment service providers) across the six CEMAC states—including CAR—from acquiring, holding, exchanging, converting, or settling any cryptocurrency transaction on their own or clients' behalf.

The government's 2022 Project Sango—a national crypto token backed by Bitcoin promising e-residency, land tokenization, and a 'Crypto City'—attracted IMF criticism for untested design, governance gaps, and failure to meet financial-inclusion goals; it effectively collapsed without achieving its objectives.

Neither CAR domestically nor the CEMAC supranational architecture has established a licensing or registration regime for virtual-asset service providers. COBAC and BEAC are collaborating with the IMF on a harmonised regional crypto-asset framework, but no such framework is yet in force.

In early 2025 the government promoted a '$CAR' meme coin on social media; it suffered extreme volatility and raised concerns about market manipulation and opaque governance, highlighting the absence of a consumer-protection or token-offering framework.

The IMF's 2023 Selected Issues report on CAR identified internet penetration below 15%, limited banking infrastructure, and weak institutional capacity as structural barriers to any functional crypto framework, and called for prerequisite conditions before further digital-asset adoption.