The governor of the issuing institute shared by the six CEMAC states (Cameroon, Congo, Gabon, Chad, CAR, and Equatorial Guinea) has strongly discouraged people from investing in crypto-currencies during a press conference that marked the first extraordinary meeting of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of Central African States (Beac) for the year 2022 on November 18, 2022 in Ndjamena, the capital of Chad.

“Beac’s choice is to warn the public against investing in these risky speculative assets. Since the beginning of 2022, Bitcoin, for instance, has lost more than 70% of its value,” according to Abbas Mahamat Tolli (photo). He emphasised that cryptocurrency is still an unrecognised currency in the CEMAC market. 

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He insisted, “I would like to stress out that the only currency for all the countries of the CEMAC zone is the CFA franc. Thus, Abbas Mahamat Tolli upholds the position of the central bank in the face of RCA’s formalisation of a cryptocurrency on April 22, 2022.

The new rules governing the common financial market in the CEMAC countries, which include the floating of “digital assets” and “digital tokens,” were published a few weeks before the resignation of the former governor of the central bank of the CEMAC countries. 

According to article 76 of this regulation, which was adopted on July 21, 2022 by the Ministerial Committee of the Monetary Union of Central Africa (UMAC) and made available to the public on July 14, 2022, “any intangible asset representing, in digital form, one or more rights issued, registered, stored, or transferred by means of a shared electronic recording device allowing to identify, directly or indirectly, constitutes a token.” 

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According to financial market participants involved in the development of this book, this concept encompasses not only cryptocurrency, but also video games, photos, and software.

Furthermore, “services on digital assets” are now among the activities permitted in the CEMAC financial market. Article 160 defines this as “the act of providing one or more of the following services or operations: storage of digital activities on behalf of a third party; purchase of digital assets against a legal tender currency or against other digital assets; operation of a digital asset trading platform; other services on digital assets such as the reception and transmission of orders on behalf of third parties, portfolio management.” 

Furthermore, the inclusion of cryptoassets in the regulatory corpus of the sub-regional financial market does not bestow legal standing on cryptocurrencies in the CEMAC zone.

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Charles Rapulu Udoh

Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer, who has several years of experience working in Africa’s burgeoning tech startup industry. He has closed multi-million dollar deals bordering on venture capital, private equity, intellectual property (trademark, patent or design, etc.), mergers and acquisitions, in countries such as in the Delaware, New York, UK, Singapore, British Virgin Islands, South Africa, Nigeria etc. He’s also a corporate governance and cross-border data privacy and tax expert. 
As an award-winning writer and researcher, he is passionate about telling the African startup story, and is one of the continent’s pioneers in this regard. You can book a session and speak with him using the link: https://insightsbyexperts.com/view_expert/charles-rapulu-udoh