Lead image for Why M-Pesa ought to make Kenya world’s crypto capital.
Kenya spent 20 years teaching its people to trust digital money. New rules can now turn that head start into leadership — if we clear the gates still in the way.
In 2023, a blockchain firm based in Abu Dhabi hired me to help it enter Africa, with Kenya as its first stop. The team expected to teach a frontier market about digital money. Instead, they watched a vegetable seller close a sale by phone in seconds.
No card. No cash. No bank in sight. Kenya was not behind. In the ways that mattered, it was ahead. It had the trust needed to scale virtual asset use and the infrastructure to support it.
Trust in digital money may explain why Kenyans readily began trading cryptocurrency, a virtual asset, with no regulation. According to Chainalysis, Kenya recorded about $19 billion in crypto inflows between July 2024 and June 2025. Kenyans also sent and received roughly $3.3 billion in stablecoin transactions in the year to June 2024, the fourth-highest figure in Africa.
This month, that informality ends. The Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASP) Act, in force since November 2025, and its rulebook, the VASP Regulations 2026, gazetted this month, require the licensing of stablecoin issuers, wallets, exchanges and brokers. Crypto inflows can now be counted, taxed and channelled through licensed institutions rather than moving off the books.
Six million Kenyan crypto users
Global exchanges that have watched Kenya from a distance now have a lawful path to set up locally. Banks also gain clarity, free to serve licensed firms rather than treat the sector as an undefined risk. More than six million Kenyan crypto users gain something they never had: vetted operators and recourse when a scheme collapses. An opportunity has also emerged in real estate.
Virtual assets are not only coins traded for profit; a building can now be split into digital tokens and sold in fractions, letting ordinary Kenyans and chamas own a slice of a valuable property for a few thousand shillings, the way one buys shares in a company, while a developer gains a licence to open an entire portfolio to thousands of buyers at once.