On 6 May 2022 the banking supervisor of Central Africa told every bank in six countries to stop holding, exchanging or converting crypto. Four years later, no published text makes owning bitcoin a crime, the 2024 finance law taxes “income from digital assets”, and at 09:59 UTC on 26 October 2026 Binance’s peer-to-peer market showed 121 offers to sell USDT for CFA francs, most of them paid through MTN Mobile Money. So is crypto legal in Cameroon? The honest answer is that it is neither banned for individuals nor licensed for anyone, and the gap between those two facts is where the risk sits.
Below is what each authority has actually written, and when: the central bank (BEAC), the banking commission (COBAC), the market regulator (COSUMAF) and Cameroon’s tax law. It then turns to what people do in practice, P2P trades over mobile money, the scams that followed, and the two risks that DeFi users in the region face and Western guides rarely mention: a franc tied to the euro and a banking system closed to crypto. Facts are as of October 2026.
If you came here from our lesson on crypto taxes in Canada, one idea carries over: the label the law puts on your activity decides the tax. In Cameroon the label exists on paper, but the instructions for using it are still missing.
Is crypto legal in Cameroon? Four layers of rules
Cameroon belongs to the CEMAC, the Economic and Monetary Community of Central Africa, with Gabon, the Republic of the Congo, Chad, the Central African Republic and Equatorial Guinea. The six states share one currency, the Central African CFA franc (code XAF), and one central bank, the BEAC, based in Yaoundé. Banking supervision belongs to the COBAC, the regional banking commission. The regional financial market, with its own regulator COSUMAF, is a separate world. Crypto rules come from all of them, plus national tax law.
Put side by side, they give a layered answer rather than a yes or no:
- The BEAC says the CFA franc is the only legal money in the zone and has repeatedly advised people against crypto.
- The COBAC, since 6 May 2022, forbids the banks, microfinance institutions and payment institutions it supervises to hold, exchange or convert crypto-assets.
- The CEMAC financial market regulation of 2022 and the COSUMAF General Regulation of May 2023 created a licence for digital asset service providers, but no licence had been granted as of June 2026.
- Cameroon’s Finance Law for 2024 brought income from digital assets into the tax on income from stocks and shares, and left the details to a ministerial text that, to our knowledge, has not been published.
That is the short answer when people ask whether crypto is legal in Cameroon: no text we found makes it a crime for a private person to buy, hold or sell crypto. Headlines saying “Cameroon bans crypto” go further than the texts: what is barred is the regulated financial system touching crypto, and unlicensed firms raising money from the public.
Who does what in the CEMAC zone
| Body | Role | What it said on crypto | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| BEAC (central bank) | Issues the XAF franc, runs monetary policy | Crypto is not money in the CEMAC; the governor advised people not to invest | 18 November 2022 |
| COBAC (banking commission) | Supervises banks, microfinance and payment institutions | Bars supervised institutions from holding, exchanging or converting crypto | 6 May 2022 |
| COSUMAF (market regulator) | Supervises the regional financial market | General Regulation creating a licence for digital asset service providers | 23 May 2023 |
| UMAC ministerial committee | Adopts regional financial regulations | Market regulation No. 01/22 covering digital tokens | 21 July 2022 |
| Cameroon Parliament | Votes the yearly finance law | Income from digital assets added to the tax on income from stocks and shares | Law No. 2023/019, 19 December 2023 |
Our guide on how to buy crypto in Africa already gives a short overview of the CEMAC and UEMOA zones and walks through a P2P purchase with mobile money. We will not repeat those steps here; this lesson goes into the texts behind them and what they mean for someone living in Douala, Yaoundé, Libreville or Brazzaville.
The BEAC position: the CFA franc is the only money
The central bank’s line has been consistent. On 18 November 2022, after an extraordinary meeting of its monetary policy committee in N’Djamena, BEAC governor Abbas Mahamat Tolli advised the public not to invest in crypto-assets, which he described as speculative and very risky, and pointed out that bitcoin had lost more than 70% of its value since the start of that year, according to Investir au Cameroun. He also repeated that crypto is not a recognised currency in the CEMAC.
His successor, Yvon Sana Bangui, has kept that position while opening a different door. At a conference on crypto-assets organised by the BCEAO in Dakar in May 2026, he said the BEAC wanted to promote a sovereign digital instrument pegged strictly to the CFA franc rather than let private dollar stablecoins spread, according to a brief by the French Treasury’s regional economic service in Yaoundé (week of 11 to 15 May 2026). The same brief says the BEAC is working with the IMF on a sub-regional framework for crypto-assets, whose publication was expected during the current year.
That work had a visible step a few months earlier. From 23 to 27 February 2026, the BEAC and the IMF held a seminar at the Hilton in Yaoundé on central bank digital currencies and the regulation of crypto-assets, with experts from the COBAC, the COSUMAF and GABAC, the regional anti-money-laundering body. The seminar produced no rule. As of the sources available in October 2026, no harmonised CEMAC regulation on crypto-assets has been adopted.
The BEAC’s firmest act so far concerned a member state. In April 2022 the Central African Republic made bitcoin legal tender, and the central bank objected that a single state could not create a parallel currency inside a monetary union. The CAR legislature adopted an amended law on 23 March 2023 that removed that status, according to Central Banking. The episode belongs to a later lesson on blockchain and crypto in Africa; here it shows how far the union will go to protect the single currency.
The COBAC ban: what it forbids, and to whom
On 6 May 2022 the COBAC met in extraordinary session by videoconference, two weeks after the Central African Republic’s bitcoin law. Its decision, referred to by legal commentators as decision D-2022/071, was announced in a communiqué published by the BEAC and reported by Journal du Cameroun. It covers institutions under COBAC supervision: banks and financial institutions, microfinance institutions, payment institutions and, according to one commentary, licensed bureaux de change.
Those institutions may not, for their own account or for clients:
- hold or subscribe crypto-assets;
- exchange or convert crypto-assets, or settle crypto transactions against CFA francs or foreign currencies;
- use bitcoin or any other crypto as a unit of account for assets, liabilities or off-balance-sheet items.
They were also asked to set up a system to identify and report crypto-related operations. Its stated reasons were financial stability and the protection of depositors.
What the decision does not do matters as much. It binds supervised institutions, not the public. Professor Yvette Rachel Kalieu Elongo of the University of Dschang wrote on 23 May 2022 that the decision does not bind individuals or companies in the zone, who can still hold and use crypto, often through platforms based abroad. The practical effect is indirect but heavy: a bank in Cameroon cannot be the bridge between your crypto and your CFA francs. That is why the real market moved to mobile money and P2P.
What the CEMAC texts on digital assets actually contain
There is a regional text in force that names digital assets, but it is a financial market law, not a crypto law. Regulation No. 01/22/CEMAC/UMAC/CM/COSUMAF on the organisation and functioning of the Central African financial market was adopted by the UMAC ministerial committee in Douala on 21 July 2022. It brings “digital tokens” under the rules on public offers of securities and lists a set of digital asset services that require authorisation. According to a commentary on Droit Medias Finance, it does not define “digital assets” as such and gives crypto no monetary status, and it is unclear whether native coins like bitcoin or ether fit its definition of a token at all.
The COSUMAF General Regulation of May 2023 and the licence nobody holds
The COSUMAF General Regulation of 23 May 2023 went further. According to Jean Patrick Musima Bille, a trainee lawyer at Abeng Law Firm in Douala, writing in Village de la Justice on 18 June 2026, it is the first binding regional text that requires a licence for digital asset service providers, known by the French acronym PSAN. The services listed include buying and selling crypto-assets against legal tender, custody, running a trading platform, receiving and transmitting orders, portfolio management, advice and placement. The COSUMAF can also requalify a “security token” as a security.
On paper, then, a Cameroonian exchange could apply for a COSUMAF licence. In practice, the lawyer notes, the ten implementing instructions adopted on 5 December 2023 include none for PSAN, and at the time he wrote, more than three years after the regulation, no PSAN licence had been granted. Investir au Cameroun had reported the same gap on 27 June 2025 (“no licence has yet been issued”), adding that the pan-African platform Yellow Card was struggling to establish itself in Cameroon. The licence exists on paper; the application route does not.
What is still missing
Three pieces are not in place as of October 2026. The harmonised regulation on crypto-assets prepared by the BEAC with the IMF, the COBAC and the COSUMAF has not been published. The PSAN instruction that would let a firm actually apply has not appeared. And the question of who would supervise a stablecoin pegged to the CFA franc, the banking side or the market side, is still open in the commentaries. Until those exist, any platform you use from Cameroon operates under foreign rules, and none of them is licensed in the CEMAC.
Crypto taxes in Cameroon: what the law says and what it leaves out
Before 2024, the tax administration said it plainly. The explanatory memorandum of the draft Finance Law for 2024, published by the Directorate General of the Budget, described crypto income as a tax niche that escaped taxation under the law then in force. The government then moved to close it.
The enacted text is Law No. 2023/019 of 19 December 2023, the Finance Law for 2024. In the General Tax Code section on income from stocks and shares, the tax known in French as IRCM, it adds a new category: “income from digital assets”. A new Section 42 bis then says that the methods of taxing that income are to be laid down by a separate instrument of the Minister in charge of finance. The memorandum covered both interest earned on digital assets and gains on their sale.
The missing ministerial text and the rate question
That separate instrument is the key, and we could not find it. No arrêté or circular from the Ministry of Finance setting the base, the rate or the filing method for digital-asset income appears in the sources we checked as of October 2026. The English text of the 2026 finance bill, published by the Directorate General of the Budget in November 2025, contains no provision on digital assets or crypto; we have not read the enacted 2026 law in full.
So what rate applies? The law does not say. The Directorate General of Taxes’ own summary sheet of the main taxes (April 2025) lists the IRCM at 15%, before the additional council centimes (CAC) that are levied on top of several taxes. Whether that rate, or any exemption that applies to share gains, reaches crypto is exactly what the ministerial text was meant to settle. Pages that state a precise crypto tax rate for Cameroon are going beyond the published law.
How to think about it until the rules are complete
The principle is set: gains and income from crypto are taxable in Cameroon from 2024. What a taxpayer lacks is the method. A sensible position is to keep full records of every purchase and sale in XAF (date, amount, counterparty, mobile-money reference), because whatever the instrument eventually says, the calculation will start from a gain, which means a cost and a selling price. Our guide on how to calculate crypto capital gains explains the usual methods, and crypto tax basics explains why a regular trading business can be taxed differently from an occasional investor.
Someone who trades daily for clients, or runs a P2P desk as a business, is not in the same position as a saver who bought a little bitcoin. The first looks like a business activity, with the business-profit taxes and the registration duties that go with it. For anything beyond small amounts, a written question to the tax office or the advice of a Cameroonian accountant is worth more than any online rate table.
One tax certainly applies to the P2P route: the tax on money transfers. Article 228 quinquies of the General Tax Code, as worded in the Finance Law for 2025, sets it at 0.2% of the amount transferred or withdrawn, plus a specific duty of XAF 4 per transaction, and the DGI sheet lists the same figures. It hits the mobile-money leg of a P2P trade, not the crypto itself.
Money leaving the zone: what the exchange rules say
The CEMAC exchange regulation, Regulation No. 02/18/CEMAC/UMAC/CM, was signed in Yaoundé on 21 December 2018 and has applied since 1 March 2019. It is strict about foreign currency. Under Article 36, foreign currency held in a member state must be sold to or deposited with a credit institution. Article 37 requires residents to surrender to their bank the foreign-currency income they collect abroad. Article 41 forbids resident legal persons other than credit institutions to open foreign-currency accounts outside the CEMAC without BEAC permission, and Article 42 requires resident individuals to declare to the BEAC the accounts they hold abroad.
The regulation does not mention crypto. It does say, in Article 33, that external transactions made with electronic payment instruments are treated like transfers and manual exchange. Nobody has published how the BEAC or a bank would classify a dollar stablecoin balance on a foreign exchange held by a Cameroonian resident. That uncertainty is the real exchange-control risk: not a known penalty, but a rule written for bank accounts that could be read onto crypto at any time.
How people actually use crypto in Cameroon
The ramp most people use is P2P. A buyer picks an offer on a marketplace, sends CFA francs by MTN Mobile Money or Orange Money to the seller, and the platform releases the crypto from escrow once the seller confirms. Binance’s P2P marketplace lists XAF: at 09:59 UTC on 26 October 2026 its public listings showed 121 offers to sell USDT against XAF, most of them accepting MTN Mobile Money, and 63 offers accepting Orange Money. Those counts move by the hour; treat them as a snapshot, not a price guide. Binance holds no COSUMAF licence, since none has been issued; the trade is between two individuals, and the platform only holds the coins in escrow.
The risks of that route are concrete. A mobile-money payment can be reversed after the crypto has been released. A seller can receive money that came from fraud, and the victim’s complaint then lands on the seller’s account. And the mobile-money operators are payment institutions under COBAC supervision, the same institutions told in May 2022 to identify and report crypto-related operations. We found no documented case of a Cameroonian mobile-money account frozen for crypto trading, so we do not claim one; the reporting duty, however, is on the record.
The scams that shaped the authorities’ view
Much of the official hostility comes from losses. In November 2020, Finance Minister Louis-Paul Motazé ordered unapproved companies collecting money from the public for crypto placements to stop, refund all funds without delay and stop advertising, after the COSUMAF had published a list of such firms, according to Financial Afrik. The notice targeted public offers without a licence, not ownership of crypto.
On 23 February 2023, at the opening of the judicial year, the First President of the Supreme Court, Daniel Mekobe Sone, spoke about bitcoin and other coins, named the clandestine structures MIDA in Yaoundé and Liyeplimal in Douala, and said thousands of Cameroonians had rushed into such offers and several billion francs had vanished. He told police and judges to rely on existing offences, among them fraud through a public appeal for savings, illegal banking, money laundering and usury, while respecting the principle that there is no crime without a law. Coming from the country’s highest judge, that is a clear sign that holding crypto is not, in itself, a crime.
The state also sees crypto in its financial-crime work. Cameroon’s first national money-laundering risk assessment, published in August 2023, estimated that crypto used by terrorist groups generated illicit flows of about XAF 160 billion in 2018, according to Financial Afrik, which reported in August 2026 on a workshop held in Yaoundé with US agencies on terrorist financing through crypto-assets.
Checks before you send money
A promise of a fixed monthly return, a “trader” who contacts you on WhatsApp, a company that asks you to recruit friends: these were the marks of MIDA and Liyeplimal and they still are. Before sending francs to anyone, check whether the firm claims a COSUMAF licence (none exists yet, so a claim is itself a red flag), use only the escrow of the marketplace, never release crypto before the money is in your account and settled, and keep every receipt. Our guide on how to avoid crypto scams lists the patterns in more detail.
DeFi in Cameroon: open to anyone, protected by no one
A quick reminder: wallet.">decentralised finance means lending, borrowing and trading through smart contracts on a public blockchain, with no bank or broker in between and no account to open. Our lesson DeFi explained covers how these protocols work and their technical risks. For a user in Cameroon the same protocols are reachable with a phone and a wallet. What changes is the money you start from and the doors around it.
No CEMAC text names DeFi. The COSUMAF regime targets service providers, and a protocol with no operator in the zone does not fit it neatly. In practice that means two things: nobody stops you, and nobody protects you. There is no regional complaint channel, no deposit guarantee and no licensed intermediary to turn to if a protocol fails.
The exchange-rate risk: a euro franc and dollar stablecoins
Most DeFi runs on dollar stablecoins such as USDT and USDC. The CFA franc is not tied to the dollar. It is fixed to the euro at 1 euro = 655.957 francs, a parity the Banque de France describes as maintained for both CFA zones, with convertibility guaranteed by the French Treasury. So when a user in Yaoundé turns francs into USDT, the position stops being a franc position and becomes a dollar position.
The consequence is simple arithmetic. If the euro rises 5% against the dollar while your funds sit in USDT, those stablecoins buy about 5% fewer francs when you come back, even if the protocol paid you a yield and nothing broke. If the euro falls, you gain. A DeFi yield of a few percent a year can be wiped out or doubled by a currency move the protocol has nothing to do with. Our guide to what stablecoins are explains the peg mechanisms; for a CEMAC user the peg that matters most is the one between the euro and the dollar.
The P2P price adds a second layer. The rate on the marketplace is set by buyers and sellers, not by the BEAC, and it can move away from the official cross rate when demand spikes or when mobile money is disrupted. The BEAC’s stated preference for a digital franc over private dollar stablecoins is also a signal: a future regional rule may treat dollar stablecoins more strictly than today.
Bank access and on/off-ramps
The banking commission’s decision closes the bank route at both ends. You cannot buy crypto with a card or transfer from a CEMAC bank account through the bank itself, and you cannot cash out to it as a crypto sale. Every entry and exit therefore passes through mobile money and a stranger on a P2P market. Each trip adds a spread, the 0.2% transfer tax and the risk of a reversed payment or a blocked wallet. A DeFi strategy that needs frequent moves in and out of francs pays those costs every time.
There is also no fallback if a stablecoin issuer freezes an address or a protocol is drained: no bank complaint, no local regulator, no court practice yet on DeFi losses. Self-custody gives control over keys, not protection against these events. None of this is a reason given by any authority to stay out; it is the plain cost of using DeFi from a zone where the banking system is closed to crypto.
For US and UK residents and the diaspora
If you live in the United States and send money to family in Cameroon, or hold crypto with relatives there, your own tax position does not change with Cameroon’s rules. The IRS taxes US citizens and residents on worldwide income and treats digital assets as property, not currency; the Form 1040 asks every filer whether they received, sold, exchanged or otherwise disposed of a digital asset during the year. The United States has no income tax treaty with Cameroon or any other CEMAC state, according to the IRS treaty list. Our guide to crypto taxes in the United States covers the details.
Foreign accounts are a separate duty. A US person whose foreign financial accounts exceed $10,000 in total at any time in the year must file an FBAR with FinCEN, and a Cameroonian bank account counts. For crypto, FinCEN’s notice of 31 December 2020 says a foreign account holding only virtual currency is not reportable on the FBAR for now, while announcing its intention to change that; an account that also holds cash is reportable.
In the UK, HMRC treats a sale, swap, spending or gift of crypto as a disposal that can give rise to Capital Gains Tax, according to its guidance updated on 5 October 2026; see our guide to crypto taxes in the UK. For the diaspora sending value home, the weak point is rarely your side of the trade. It is the recipient’s: a P2P cash-out in Douala that can be reversed, or an “investment club” that promises to double the transfer.
What to watch next
Four documents would change this lesson. First, the harmonised CEMAC framework on crypto-assets that the BEAC and the IMF are preparing, expected in 2026 according to the French Treasury. Second, a COSUMAF instruction for digital asset service providers, which would allow the first licence. Third, the Finance Minister’s instrument on how digital-asset income is taxed in Cameroon. Fourth, any concrete step towards the digital CFA franc the BEAC governor described in Dakar. The next lesson of this path looks at the other CFA zone, with Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire under the BCEAO.
