Central African Republic Makes Bitcoin Legal Tender

The Central African Republic’s presidency announced on April 27, 2022, that President Faustin-Archange Touadéra had promulgated a cryptocurrency law that made Bitcoin legal tender alongside the Central African CFA franc. The decision made the country the first in Africa, and the second after El Salvador, to give Bitcoin that status.

The announcement was more consequential than the size of the country’s economy suggested. It placed a decentralized asset inside the formal monetary system of a state that belonged to the six-country Central African Economic and Monetary Community, or CEMAC. That immediately raised a basic institutional question: how could a national crypto law operate alongside a regional currency issued under a shared central-bank framework?

What the law established

Law No. 22.004 is dated April 22, 2022, when the National Assembly adopted the measure. The United Nations later recorded that Touadéra promulgated it on April 27. Contemporaneous AFP reporting said the measure had passed unanimously and that presidential chief of staff Obed Namsio described the country as Africa’s first to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender.

The text went beyond merely allowing people to hold or trade digital assets. Article 1 said Bitcoin would be treated as a “reference currency.” Article 10 required economic agents to accept cryptocurrencies when offered to buy or sell a good or service. Article 11 directed the state to provide alternatives enabling automatic and instant conversion between cryptocurrency and the currency used in the Central African Republic.

The law also created a National Agency for the Regulation of Electronic Transactions. Yet Article 12 left the limits and operation of the promised conversion arrangements to later regulations. That gap mattered on April 27: the statute announced obligations and an institutional framework, but the surviving record did not establish that payment rails, conversion facilities, enforcement procedures or state-operated infrastructure were already functioning nationwide.

Why the decision mattered

For Bitcoin, the headline significance was sovereign adoption. El Salvador’s Bitcoin Law had taken effect on September 7, 2021; the Central African Republic now supplied a second national test and the first inside a monetary union. But the Central African measure was broader and less precise in places, frequently regulating “cryptocurrencies” as a class while singling out Bitcoin as the reference currency.

For regional monetary governance, the decision created visible tension. The Central African CFA franc was not a purely national instrument, so provisions that compelled acceptance and promised conversion could not be assessed only as domestic technology policy. The central question was whether Bangui could impose those duties without conflicting with CEMAC and Bank of Central African States rules. On April 27, that question was unresolved; claims that the law had already displaced the CFA franc would have gone beyond the available evidence.

The government’s stated case was developmental. Namsio said the president supported the law because it would improve citizens’ conditions, but the April 27 statement did not provide a costed implementation program or adoption data. That was an official aspiration, not a measured result.

What remained uncertain on April 27

No event-day evidence reviewed for this reconstruction demonstrates transaction volumes, merchant acceptance, government Bitcoin purchases or a causal market-price response. Coinburn therefore makes no price or adoption claim here. The verified development is legal and institutional: a presidential promulgation, a mandatory-acceptance provision and a promised conversion mechanism whose practical design remained incomplete.

Later context

A United Nations report dated July 1, 2022, recorded that the governor of the regional central bank asked the finance minister on April 29 to cancel the law. An IMF report published in July 2022 described legal-tender cryptoassets as presenting risks to macro-financial stability, financial integrity and consumer protection across CEMAC. Those later records clarify the institutional conflict; they do not change what was knowable on April 27.