Why M-Pesa ought to make Kenya world’s crypto capital
This story has significance for readers across Kenya and beyond.
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.
Kenya has a real opportunity to become the jurisdiction of choice in the region for virtual asset businesses. While Dubai and Singapore built their systems on top of ordinary banks, Kenya has something rarer: two decades of people moving money by phone without a second thought. Last financial year, M-Pesa moved Sh41.68 trillion across 46.4 billion transactions. You cannot buy that. You can only grow it, and no rival can copy it.
This structural advantage, a digital-money-savvy population with deep mobile-money penetration, combined with strong crypto inflows and the new regulations, makes the case for regional leadership. The regulations legalise cryptocurrency and stablecoins; mobile money apps such as M-Pesa become the last mile, delivering that value straight to a phone.
A licensed Kenyan stablecoin issuer or exchange need not build that reach; it can ride rails already crossing counties and borders. Regulated stablecoins settle payments in minutes, not days: a trader pays an overseas supplier without queuing for scarce dollars, and money sent home by relatives abroad lands directly on a phone at lower cost, keeping more of every shilling in the household.
Mobile-money network
Honesty sharpens the case. We are not the leader yet. Dubai has licensed over 500 firms and oversees more than $25 billion. Rwanda passed its own law in May, Nigeria's crypto market approaches $92 billion, and Mauritius has regulated since 2021.
The field is crowded, but none of these jurisdictions pairs a full legal framework with the deepest mobile-money network on earth. A law can be written in a year. What Kenya built took 20. That is the moat, and it is ours to lose.
Three things must happen to ensure it does. First, fix a trap of our own making: a firm cannot be licensed without proving it holds capital, yet cannot open a bank account to hold that capital without a licence. A holding account that opens an application and unlocks licensing solves this. Second, pace.
Not a single firm has been licensed so far, and existing operators now have only until November 4, 2026, one year from the Act's commencement, to be licensed or shut down. A hub is built by a regulator that licenses fast and keeps fees light enough for small firms to survive, not by a market waiting nervously for approval while Lagos, Kigali or a Gulf city use every day of delay to court the same investors.
Third, trust. Kenyans have watched crypto schemes collapse, and rules on paper do not erase that memory. It will be earned the way M-Pesa earned it, through visible action against fraudsters and disputes settled as easily as a walk into a Safaricom shop. That takes years, not months.
The cities that won this game did not win by regulating first. They won by moving with confidence. Kenya has the market, the reach, the skills, the payments heritage, and now the law. What it needs is the nerve to say what that Abu Dhabi team saw in 2023: the future of digital money is not something Nairobi must catch up to. We have lived in it for 20 years. The task now is simply to claim it.
Reporting originally appeared via Nation Africa. Read the full source for additional context.