Central African Republic Memecoin Briefly Rockets to $900 Million, But Red Flags Remain

A memecoin allegedly launched by the Central African Republic (CAR) has raised deep skepticism despite its market capitalization spiking as high as $900 million before dropping back to $60 million.

The $CAR token was launched on Feb. 9. by the X account of the president of the CAR, Faustin-Archange Touadéra. The post described the token 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.”

In an accompanying video, Touadéra refers to the token explicitly as a “memecoin.”

While speculation that the video is a deepfake and the X account hacked is rampant, the idea got some credibility because, in April 2022, the CAR became the second country after El Salvador to make Bitcoin an official currency.

Beyond that, the CAR president’s X account still has a pair of videos up announcing the $CAR token and then lauding its success a day later.

The wartorn Central African Republic is one of the poorest countries on earth, with more than one million people displaced by violence, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.

Red Flags

The domain name of the project’s website was only registered three days earlier on Namecheap, Yokai Ryujin, founder of Unrevealed XYZ, said in an X post beginning with “CT and my crew be cautious about $CAR.”

He also noted that the coin launched at 1 am CAR time, an odd hour for an official project.

As for the video, several deepfake checkers flagged the video as suspicious, but those checkers themselves have been known to be wrong in the past. Commentators noted that the background in the launch video looks suspiciously AI-generated.

Ryujin also noted that contrary to the team’s claims of locking tokens, it retains more than enough tokens to drain the project’s entire liquidity, currently $1.6 million with a market cap of $60 million.

“Executed in a scammy way, it drained more liquidity than any recent token. They sniped $75M+, held until ATH, then started dumping—moves no normal sniper makes unless they’re insiders,” Ryujin wrote earlier this morning.