In this guide
On 14 August 2026 bitcoin is trading near 62,600 dollars, which is about 35.6 million FCFA for one coin at a dollar of roughly 569 francs. That is close to 50 percent below the record of 126,080 dollars set on 6 October 2025, according to CoinGecko. If you are holding bitcoin bought at a higher price, the honest answer is that this bitcoin price drop should change nothing about your plan, as long as the money you used is money you do not need this year. Selling now turns a paper loss into a permanent one, and you pay our spread on the way out and again on the way back in.
That is the general answer. The specific answer depends on one thing only: when you need the money. If the francs sitting in bitcoin are francs you need within twelve months, for rent, for school fees in September, for a supplier order, then that money was never bitcoin money in the first place. Move it now, deliberately, into francs or into dollars you can spend, and accept the loss on your own terms instead of at 2am in three months when the deadline arrives. Below is what our desk in Douala is actually seeing this month: what fell and by how much, how a falling market changes the rates you get on WhatsApp, and the scam wave that follows every drawdown like clockwork.
How far has bitcoin actually fallen in 2026?
Far, but slowly, and the slowness is the part that matters.
This has not been a crash in the 2020 sense, where the price fell 40 percent in two days and bounced. It has been a grind. Bitcoin is down about 4 percent over the last week, about 4 percent over the last month, and about 6 percent over the last two months. Stack those small monthly losses across ten months and you arrive at a halving of the price without a single dramatic day. The Fear and Greed Index has sat at 29 for three days running, which is fear territory, not panic territory.
| Time frame | Change in bitcoin price | What it looks like on the desk |
|---|---|---|
| Last 24 hours | Down about 2 percent | Normal noise, nobody calls |
| Last 7 days | Down about 4 percent | A few "should I sell" messages |
| Last 30 days | Down about 4 percent | Buying volume slows, selling picks up |
| Since October 2025 record | Down about 50 percent | Anyone who bought in 2025 is underwater |
The FCFA numbers make it concrete. One bitcoin was worth roughly 71.7 million francs at the October 2025 peak. Today it is worth roughly 35.6 million. A client who put 2 million francs into bitcoin in November 2025 is looking at something near 1 million francs now. That is a real loss and pretending otherwise helps nobody. It is also a loss that only becomes final when they sell.
Does a bitcoin price drop change anything if you bought with MoMo?
Not mechanically, no. Your coins do not know how you paid for them.
We get this question every week and the confusion behind it is worth clearing up. Buying bitcoin through MTN MoMo or Orange Money is a payment method, not an investment product. Nobody can margin call you, nobody can liquidate your position, and no platform is holding your coins hostage as long as they are in a wallet whose recovery phrase you control. If you bought 200,000 francs of bitcoin in March and it is now showing 150,000 francs, you still own exactly the same amount of bitcoin. Only the price tag changed.
What does change is the exit. In a falling market, cashing out to MoMo takes slightly longer and costs slightly more, and we cover the fee side of that in detail on the rates page. It is also the moment when people who bought on a P2P platform discover their coins were never really theirs, because they left them sitting on an exchange account that now has a withdrawal queue. Self custody is boring advice until a week like this one.
The one group who genuinely need to act are people who borrowed to buy. Every drawdown we have traded through, somebody in Douala or Bamenda took a njangi loan or a family loan to buy bitcoin because a WhatsApp group promised a rally. If that is you, the debt is fixed in francs and the asset is not. Close the position, clear the debt, and come back with money that has no deadline attached. If you want a second opinion on the numbers before you decide, get a live quote on WhatsApp and we will walk through the actual figures with you rather than a general rule.
Should you sell your bitcoin now or wait?
There is no single answer, but there is a clean way to sort yourself into one of three groups.
| Your situation | What we recommend | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Bought with spare money, no deadline | Hold, and stop checking the price daily | Selling into fear locks the loss and costs two spreads |
| Money needed within 12 months | Move it out now, into francs or USDT | The deadline will not move because the market fell |
| Bought with borrowed money | Exit and clear the debt | The loan is fixed in francs, the coin is not |
| Wanted to buy anyway, cash ready | Buy on a schedule, not in one lump | Nobody calls the bottom, including us |
| Saving for tuition or a supplier | Should be in USDT, not bitcoin | Dollar bills need dollar savings |
Notice what is missing from that table: any prediction about where the price goes next. We do not make them, and you should be suspicious of anyone in this market who does. What we can tell you is that the people on our books who came out of the 2022 drawdown in good shape all did the same two things. They never held bitcoin with money that had a date attached, and they never sold on the day the group chat was loudest.
If your real goal was protecting savings rather than growing them, bitcoin was the wrong tool from the start and this is the month that proves it. Dollar stablecoins do not fall when bitcoin falls. That distinction is the whole argument in bitcoin vs USDT in Cameroon, and the arithmetic for savers is worked out fully in saving in USDT vs FCFA. If you decide to switch, the process is on our buy USDT in Cameroon page.
What happens to P2P rates in Cameroon when the market falls?
They get worse, and understanding why saves you money.
In a calm market, the gap between what a Cameroonian buyer pays and what a seller receives is narrow, because plenty of people want both sides of the trade. In a falling market that balance breaks. Almost everybody wants to sell and very few want to buy, so anyone willing to buy prices in the risk of holding an asset that may be worth less by the time they offload it. The spread widens. That is not a desk squeezing you, it is what happens when liquidity dries up.
Three practical effects we are seeing this month:
- Sell orders above about 3 million francs take longer to fill, especially on weekends when fewer counterparties are online.
- Quoted rates expire faster. A quote that held for an hour in June may hold for fifteen minutes now, because the underlying price is moving against whoever holds the position.
- Small buyers get better relative treatment than large sellers, which is the reverse of a normal market.
The lesson is timing, not panic. If you need to sell a large amount, split it, do it on a weekday morning, and confirm the rate before sending anything. Our current buy and sell levels are always published on the rates page, and the general safety checks before any trade are on the safety page.
Why do scams spike after a bitcoin crash?
Because losses make people willing to believe things they would laugh at in a good month.
Every drawdown produces the same three offers in Cameroonian WhatsApp and Telegram groups, and they are all circulating right now. The first is the recovery scam: someone claims they can recover the money you lost, for an upfront fee. Nobody can. The money is not lost in a place anyone can retrieve it from, it simply has a lower price. The second is the guaranteed yield offer, promising 10 or 20 percent a month in USDT to "make back" your losses while the market is down. That is a Ponzi structure with a crypto label. The third is the fake insider signal, where a "trader" says he knows the bottom and will trade your account for you if you send him the coins.
We see all three land on real clients, and the drawdown is exactly when they work. The verification habits that stop them are the same ones we set out in WhatsApp crypto scams in Cameroon, and the mobile money side of the pattern is covered on our MoMo scams page. One rule handles most of it: nobody who can genuinely make money in this market needs yours to do it.
What our desk is telling clients this week
The same three sentences, in this order.
First, check whether the money has a deadline. If it does, the market's direction is irrelevant and you should move it today. Second, if it has no deadline, do nothing at all this week, and consider deleting the price app from your phone for a month. Third, if you have been meaning to start buying and have spare francs, a fixed monthly amount into bitcoin or dollars is a better plan than trying to guess the bottom, because guessing is how people end up buying with a shaking hand at the worst possible moment in both directions.
None of that is exciting. Boring is what has actually worked on our book across two full cycles, and it is what we will still be saying if the price is 40,000 dollars in November or 90,000.