The Central African Republic (CAR) has come a long way in the digital currency space. The nation was the second in the world to declare bitcoin legal tender within its borders, clearly following in the footsteps of the Central American nation of El Salvador. Now, representatives for the country have announced that they are going to be creating their own digital currency that residents can use to purchase goods and services.
The Central African Republic Has a Lot of Crypto Ambitions
Africa is a continent with many countries. Several of these regions have long been subjected to financial and political corruption, and the Central African Republic is no exception. The country has sought to implement bitcoin as official money for those looking for alternative monetary means or who cannot gain access to clean banking services, and crypto has long appeared to be a solid answer to these problems.
But it looks like bitcoin isn’t the only solution the Central African Republic is looking to. The nation wants to have a unique currency in digital form all its own, and now it’s arriving through an asset called Sango Coin. In a recent interview, president Faustin-Archange Touadera stated that this unique digital currency will be the financial tool for the “next generation.”
While discussing the Central African Republic and its monetary plans, Touadera said of his country:
It’s one of the world’s poorest countries with significant infrastructure gaps. The Central African Republic sits on a mountain of resources — gold, diamonds, rare minerals, unexploited resources. Sango Coin will enable direct access to our resources for the whole world.
While the Central African Republic’s ambitions are no doubt extraordinary, they are not necessarily original in the sense that it is not the first African nation to explore its own digital currency. In June of last year, Ghana – another country on the African landscape – stated that it was in the process of developing a virtual asset that it was calling e-cedi. The coin was slated to enjoy three pilot stages before being unleashed to locals, according to Dr. Ernest Addison who worked on the project.
In an interview, Addison explained:
The Bank of Ghana was one of the first African central banks to declare that we were working on a digital currency looking at the concept of an e-cedi. From that pilot, we will be able to determine whether this is feasible and what sort of things need to be tweaked to make it work effectively.
El Salvador Came First
CAR, as mentioned, made bitcoin legal tender only after El Salvador, which up to this point, has enjoyed something of a mixed back of results.
Many large financial organizations such as the World Bank have turned their backs on El Salvador, claiming BTC was too volatile and speculative to be taken seriously.