CAR's Mysterious Memecoin: Deepfake President or Crypto Scam?

The Central African Republic (CAR) has launched a memecoin, which has quickly gained attention and reached a market capitalization of $527 million. The token, launched on the Solana-based memecoin launchpad Pump.fun, has sparked controversy due to suspicions surrounding the authenticity of a video announcement by President Faustin-Archange Touadera.

At least two deepfake AI detectors have flagged the video as suspicious, with one model indicating an 82% chance that the video was a deepfake. However, two other models did not detect the video as being AI-generated. The video, posted on X, announced the official memecoin for the country as an "experiment" to aid national development and put the nation on the international stage.

The token's official website includes a supposed video statement from President Touadera and a tokenomics page that shows the intended breakdown of the token's total supply. However, skeptics have called into question the legitimacy of the token, suggesting that it could be the result of a sophisticated hack of Touadera's official X account.

The domain for the CAR memecoin's website was registered just three days ago on domain provider Namecheap, raising further suspicions about the token's authenticity. Namecheap has since suspended the abusive service, but the official car.meme website remains online at the time of publication.

The CAR memecoin's token distribution data appears to match up roughly with the tokenomics published on the official website. However, the 20% allocation of CAR supply, which was promised to be allocated to liquidity, has not yet been added to a liquidity pool for the token.

The Central African Republic has a history with cryptocurrency, having adopted Bitcoin as legal tender and signing a crypto regulatory framework bill into law. The launch of the CAR memecoin comes amidst a spree of hacks targeting official X accounts to promote memecoin scams.