Central African Republic video flagged ‘suspicious’ as token hits $527M

At least two deepfake AI detectors have flagged the Central African Republic President’s video announcing their newly launched memecoin as suspicious, as the token reached a $530 million market capitalization on Feb. 9.

In a Feb. 9 post to X, CAR President Faustion-Archange Touadera’s X account announced the official memecoin for the country on X as an “experiment” to aid national development and put the nation on the international stage. 

The CAR memecoin was launched at 10:25 pm UTC on the Solana-based memecoin launchpad Pump.fun and has since rallied to a peak valuation of $527 million, according to data from DexScreener. 

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, one AI deepfake detection model on the free deepfake checker tool Deepware has flagged the video as suspicious, while another said there was an 82% chance that the video was a deepfake. 

Two models, Avatrify and Deepware’s own checker, didn’t pick up the video as being a deepfake, and some members of the community believe the token launch is legitimate.

Others have called the token launch into question, with some speculating it could be the result of a sophisticated hack of Touadera’s official X account.  

In a Feb. 10 post to X, Yokai Ryujin, the founder of Unrevealed XYZ, warned that the process for registering the CAR memecoin’s domain on domain provider namecheap.com did not look like “what a president or country would do,” noting that it was registered just three days ago. 

In a follow-up comment on X, Namecheap said they had “suspended the abusive service”; however, the official car.meme website remains online at the time of publication. 

“Would be weird for their president to launch a coin…the language/phraseology used in the tweet is weird…and the time is midnight local time. [Wouldn’t] make sense for them to launch at that time,” added pseudonymous user Crypto Dreamer.

Related: Central African Republic will adopt Bitcoin as legal tender: Report

“Also their official language is French. The Tweet is in English only, with no French version,” they added.

Additionally, the official X account dedicated to the memecoin @Carmeme_news has been suspended by X, but the president said he was “working with X” to get the page restored as soon as possible.

In the last few weeks, there has been a spree of hacks, with scammers targeting the official X accounts of former Malaysian prime minister and Solana DEX aggregator Jupiter to promote memecoin scams.

Central African Republic was behind Sango Coin

However, some could argue that the Central African Republic is no stranger to cryptocurrency, with President Touadera adopting Bitcoin as legal tender in the nation in April 2022, as well as signing a crypto regulatory framework bill into law at the same time.

Days after Bitcoin was introduced as legal tender, the Central African Republic launched its own cryptocurrency project dubbed Sango Coin, a token created to incentivize investment from foreign investors by offering citizenship to tokenholders.

In March 2023, the CAR repealed the legislation that gave Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies status as legal tender after facing heavy backlash from their fellow members of the Economic and Monetary Community of Central Africa.

CAR tokenomics

The token distribution data available on Dexscreener appears to match up roughly with the tokenomics published on the official website, with 33.31% contained in one wallet, while 25% is held in another, according to Solscan data. 

Similarly, 9.81% and 8.39% of the total supply are held in two other wallets, one of which could represent the portion earmarked for charity.

Notably, 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. 

Magazine: Influencers shilling memecoin scams face severe legal consequences