The Central African Republic (CAR)’s digital asset project Sango Coin has been marred by a deposit downtime.
Launched last July, Sango Coin is President Faustin-Archange Touadera’s attempt at a national digital currency for the impoverished Central African country. It came just three months after President Touadera passed the Bitcoin Law, making the token legal tender in the country.
Sango has struggled to attract users in its home nation or investors from other countries. It was also dealt a major blow when the country’s Constitutional Court blocked the ‘citizenship through Sango’ package, where investors were promised citizenship if they staked Sango tokens for five years.
A deposit downtime is the latest in the long line of challenges for President Touadera’s project.
“The tech team was working hard to solve the deposit problems. We are incredibly sorry for the inconvenience,” the Sango team wrote on Telegram.
Users who made deposits during the downtime could convert their digital assets at the ‘deposit time cycle price’ by contacting the project and providing their transaction ID (TXID).
Touadera is determined to push his project. In January, he formed a new task force and mandated it with working out how to integrate the token into the country’s economy. The task force included experts from the ministries of mining, geology, and town planning. Aside from integrating the token into the economy, they were also tasked with coming up with a regulatory and economic framework for tokenization in the CAR.
While pushing a digital token is a Herculean task even for the developed nations, it’s even more so in CAR, a country where only 30% of the population owns mobile phones. Internet penetration is even lower at just 10%. CAR also ranks in the ten poorest countries in the world, further throwing Touadera’s decision to push Sango into question.
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