Central African Republic’s president announced the $CAR memecoin

Central African Republic President Faustin-Archange Touadéra’s official X account announced the $CAR memecoin on February 9, 2025, presenting the Solana token as an experiment intended to unite supporters, finance national development and raise the country’s international profile.

The announcement mattered because it attached the identity of a sovereign state—and the authority of its president—to an openly speculative token. It followed the country’s 2022 Bitcoin legal-tender episode and its Sango Coin project, but $CAR was framed as a meme rather than a payment system, reserve asset or conventional development bond. That distinction left the connection between token trading and the promised public benefit unexplained.

A presidential post and a Pump.fun token

The announcement appeared on Touadéra’s established account on February 9. The associated Pump.fun page identified the asset as “Central African Republic Meme,” used the ticker CAR and described it as the country’s official meme. The token’s Solana address was `7oBYdEhV4GkXC19ZfgAvXpJWp2Rn9pm1Bx2cVNxFpump`.

Nothing in the announcement established a legal claim on government revenue, natural resources or public assets. Nor did it explain who controlled the token’s operational wallets, how proceeds would reach the national budget, which entity would publish accounts or what rights purchasers received. The development claim was therefore a statement by the project, not a verified funding mechanism.

The event also arrived during a period in which politically branded memecoins had attracted intense trading attention. That context made presidential endorsement economically consequential even without formal monetary status: a government-associated social-media account could direct global liquidity toward a newly created, continuously traded token before conventional disclosures or institutional controls were available.

A large but fragile market signal

The Block reported that CAR traded around $0.45 and carried an indicated market capitalization of approximately $374.4 million at 8:10 p.m. ET on February 9. That was a contemporaneous point-in-time observation of the CAR instrument, not a daily close, volume-weighted price or calculation by Coinburn.

The figure also did not mean that $374.4 million had entered the project or could have been withdrawn at that valuation. Memecoin market capitalization generally multiplies a marginal trading price by token supply; it can change sharply when liquidity is limited. The surviving event-day report did not provide a complete order book, pool-depth series or independently audited supply-distribution analysis sufficient to measure how much CAR could have been sold near the quoted price.

Authenticity was part of the event-day story

The official-account announcement did not eliminate immediate uncertainty. By the time contemporaneous coverage appeared, the project’s dedicated X account had been suspended. The Block also reported that Namecheap had suspended the project’s website after a user raised concerns about its registration and launch circumstances.

A video apparently showing Touadéra accompanied the promotion, but observers disputed whether it was authentic. On February 9, the government had not yet supplied the independent confirmation, governance documentation or technical disclosures needed to resolve those doubts. Claims that the president’s account was compromised, that the video was synthetic or that particular wallets belonged to insiders remained allegations rather than established facts in the event-day record.

That uncertainty was itself significant. The market was responding to presidential authority while participants were still debating whether the message, video and supporting infrastructure were genuine. The launch demonstrated how quickly political identity, thin decentralized liquidity and social-media distribution could combine before basic authentication and accountability questions were answered.

Later confirmation, kept separate

A later United Nations Panel of Experts report recorded that Touadéra announced $CAR on February 9, 2025. It also reproduced a Ministry of Mines and Geology document dated February 10 describing CAR as the country’s official memecoin and a joint effort involving the government and BARNSLEY Ltd. That later evidence clarifies that the initiative was state-linked; it does not retroactively remove the uncertainty visible to traders on February 9 or establish that the project’s development promises were achieved.