Central African Republic will launch the continent’s first legal cryptocurrency investment hub, the presidency said, extending the impoverished country’s embrace of digital finance despite words of caution from the International Monetary Fund, Reuters agency reported.
Marred by decades of conflict, Central African Republic last month became the first country in Africa and only the second in the world to adopt bitcoin as an official currency.
The government has so far provided little detail on the logistics of its bitcoin vision.
The soon-to-be-launched “SANGO” crypto initiative has a website on which interested investors can sign up to a waiting list.
“The formal economy is no longer an option,” President Faustin-Archange Touadera said in a statement on Monday.
“An impenetrable bureaucracy is keeping us stuck in systems that do not give a chance to be competitive,” he said.
There was no indication when the investment hub would be open or how it would operate.