Sovereign Infrastructure Partnerships: Lessons From the Central African Republic

In April 2022, the Central African Republic became the second sovereign state to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender, following El Salvador’s September 2021 experiment. By March 2023, CAR’s parliament had repealed the legislation. The reversal was not close — it was a structural failure, not a political one. Understanding what failed, and why a different kind of fintech deployment in the same country is now proceeding, is the sharpest case study available in the economics of sovereign digital finance.

The Bitcoin legal tender framework collapsed under the weight of three contradictions that should have been visible from the outset. First, CAR is a member of the Central African Economic and Monetary Community, bound by a common monetary framework and a shared currency — the CFA franc — managed by the Bank of Central African States. Adopting a second legal tender without first withdrawing from that monetary union created a legal conflict that neither the regional monetary body nor the IMF would permit to persist. Second, the population had no practical means of participation: electricity access sits below 16%, mobile connectivity is limited, and GDP per capita at the time of adoption stood below $500. Legal tender means nothing if the medium cannot be held or transacted. Third — and most consequentially — the initiative was designed with political optics as its primary purpose. The Sango Coin project that followed was structured partly as a vehicle for citizenship-by-investment. When that framing attracted international regulatory scrutiny, the credibility of the entire framework collapsed.

El Salvador’s trajectory maps onto the same logic from a different angle. The country had higher connectivity, better infrastructure, and a government willing to invest $150 million in the Chivo wallet rollout. But eight in ten Salvadorans did not use Bitcoin in the years following adoption, and only 1% of total remittances involved crypto assets. The IMF’s $1.4 billion financial assistance programme, finalised in late 2024, carried conditions that effectively dismantled mandatory acceptance. Bitcoin’s legal tender status was amended in February 2025. The lesson is consistent: top-down legal mandates do not create financial adoption. Infrastructure does.

In August 2025, Biptap CEO Jonathan Low signed a partnership agreement with CAR President Faustin-Archange Touadéra to deploy banking infrastructure across the country’s 5.5 million-person population. The scope is specific: payment processing, remittances, digital accounts, and card rails. It does not touch CAR’s monetary framework, does not require withdrawal from the CEMAC bloc, and does not ask the population to hold an asset they cannot access. It works within the existing regulatory perimeter rather than attempting to override it.

The implications for operators considering sovereign-scale infrastructure deployments in frontier markets are structural. The durability of any sovereign partnership depends on the operator understanding which layer of the financial system it is operating in. Infrastructure that respects the monetary and regulatory architecture of the host state can be built, extended, and compounded over time. Infrastructure that attempts to redraw that architecture — even with presidential backing — is exposed to the first external creditor or multilateral body that objects. The CAR case illustrates both outcomes within a 36-month window. That is the kind of precedent that changes how serious operators approach sovereign mandates.

The infrastructure layer — not the legal tender layer — is where durable financial expansion in frontier markets happens. That is not a conservative observation. It is what the evidence from both CAR and El Salvador demonstrates. The operators who understood that distinction in 2022 are the ones deploying at scale in 2025.