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Kenyan investigators have never had much trouble spotting suspicious crypto transactions. Getting their hands on them has been the problem. The country’s new cryptocurrency regulations close that gap. With court approval, the rules empower authorities, including financial crime investigators, to seize devices, seed phrases, and hardware wallets that unlock digital assets, allowing the government to control cryptocurrencies linked to fraud, money laundering, corruption, and terrorism-financing investigations. Existing Kenyan laws, including the Proceeds of Crime and Anti-Money Laundering Act and the Anti-Corruption and Economic Crimes Act, already let investigators freeze traditional bank accounts and trace suspicious transfers. A crypto wallet whose owner kept the private keys offline, however, was difficult to access using general asset‑seizure powers. The Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASP) Regulations, 2026, gazetted on July 24, establish a freezing and seizure framework for virtual assets within Kenya’s broader asset‑seizure regime. “A licencee served with a seizure order shall grant an authorised officer access to any premises where the virtual asset devices are suspected to be and the authorised officer may seize and detain any physical device, hardware wallet, seed phrase backup or electronic system necessary to access the virtual assets,” the regulations read. A seed phrase is the 12- or 24-word recovery code that helps a user regain access to their crypto assets. Whoever controls it can move the funds, which is precisely why investigators now have explicit legal grounds to seize it. The regulations form part of Kenya’s broader effort to strengthen monitoring of money laundering, terrorism financing, and other illicit financial flows as the country works to exit the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) grey list. In April, Kenyan authorities froze several Binance accounts linked to suspected fraud, money laundering, terrorism financing, and the movement of stolen public funds. Binance told affected users that some restrictions had been imposed at law enforcement’s request. The new framework gives future freezes a much clearer footing. Under the Regulations, a freezing order is an order by a competent court or lawful authority directing a virtual asset service provider “to prohibit any dealing, transfer, conversion, withdrawal or disposal of a specified virtual asset,” giving investigators room to lock down assets before any seizure or forfeiture. The April operation highlighted the limits of Kenya’s existing enforcement processes. Centralised exchanges could be pressured to restrict accounts, but self-custodied wallets sitting outside regulated platforms posed a harder problem: investigators could identify the wallet without being able to touch the assets inside it. Crypto volatility is another target of the new rules. A token worth millions of shillings when frozen could lose a substantial portion of its value before a prosecution is completed. The regulations now allow authorised officers, with court approval, to convert frozen virtual assets into fiat currency during an investigation to preserve their value. “The authorised officer may, upon approval of the competent court, convert virtual assets into fiat currency to preserve value,” the regulations read. Once an order is issued, exchanges and wallet providers must preserve the affected assets, halt withdrawals and transfers, and give investigators access to relevant systems and records. Seized assets must then be transferred to a secure digital wallet controlled by the competent authority, creating a formal custody chain for recovered crypto assets. The regulations apply to any provider operating “in or from Kenya.” A platform is deemed to meet that threshold if it actively solicits or targets Kenyan users or earns income from Kenya, even without a physical office in the country. Failure to comply with a freezing or seizure order is a criminal offence. Licenced crypto operators that refuse to freeze assets, grant investigators access to premises where the suspected assets could be, or assist with the seizure and transfer of virtual assets can face fines of up to KES 5 million ($38,640), up to five years in prison, or both. Companies can be fined up to KES 8 million ($61,800). The framework forms part of Kenya’s broader effort to align with global anti-money-laundering and counter-terrorism financing standards as it works to exit the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) grey list. Bringing crypto exchanges, wallet providers, and stablecoin issuers into a licencing and reporting regime supports one of FATF’s key recommendations: improving risk-based AML/CFT supervision of financial institutions by extending oversight to sectors that have historically operated outside the traditional banking space. Kenya’s crypto market grew largely through peer-to-peer trading with limited regulatory visibility. Licencing exchanges and taxing digital assets is only part of the shift. Investigators can now treat the physical backups behind a wallet as evidence in their own right—searched for, seized, and used to secure the assets behind them—pushing Kenya toward one of the more aggressive crypto-enforcement regimes on the continent. True scale demands moving beyond surface-level integrations to robust execution. We’ve filtered the noise out of Moonshot 2026, optimising the conference strictly for high-calibre connections between startup founders, global financial operators, enterprise leaders and individuals rewiring Africa’s technical frameworks.Get 20% off Early Bird tickets for a limited time.
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Kenya could force local cryptocurrency exchanges to stop offering foreign-issued stablecoins—such as Tether’s USDT, Circle’s USDC, and Mento Labs’ USDm—after the central bank was granted authority to restrict access to offshore stablecoins, tightening oversight of the dollar-backed tokens that dominate crypto trading across Africa. The Kenyan Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASP) Regulations, 2026, published on July 24, prohibit licenced cryptocurrency exchanges from offering any stablecoin that has not been approved by the Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) and issued by a licenced stablecoin issuer. The new provision, added to the gazetted version of the rules, could force offshore stablecoin issuers such as Tether and Circle to seek CBK approval and work through licenced Kenyan entities if they want their tokens to remain available on regulated Kenyan exchange platforms. It also gives the central bank direct oversight to cut off local access to foreign stablecoins without having to regulate the offshore issuers themselves. “A virtual asset exchange shall not list any stablecoin unless that stablecoin has been approved by the Central Bank of Kenya and is issued by a duly licenced stablecoin issuer,” the policy read. A stablecoin is a cryptocurrency pegged to the value of a real-world currency, such as the US dollar. Kenyan traders widely use tokens such as USDT and USDC to move money between exchanges, hold dollar exposure, settle peer-to-peer (P2P) trades, and access international crypto markets. The final regulations go significantly further than earlier draft proposals, which contained only general powers that allow regulators to halt or delist stablecoin issuance. The gazetted version introduces a much more specific restriction aimed at foreign-issued tokens. “Where a stablecoin is issued outside Kenya, the Central Bank of Kenya may exercise its powers under this regulation by directing licenced intermediaries operating in Kenya to restrict access to, or trading of, such stablecoin,” the policy read. The move comes as regulators worldwide increase scrutiny of stablecoins following concerns about reserve backing, consumer protection, illicit financial flows, and the growing role of dollar-linked tokens in cross-border payments. The European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) framework imposes authorisation requirements on stablecoin issuers. Regulators in the United States, Singapore, and Hong Kong have also moved toward stricter oversight of fiat-referenced digital tokens. Kenya’s approach is notable because it targets market access rather than the offshore issuer itself. The CBK would not need direct jurisdiction over Tether or Circle to affect their availability in Kenya; it could order licenced local exchanges and wallet providers to stop offering the tokens to Kenyan users. The rules could have significant implications for local crypto businesses. Most retail trading activity in Kenya is conducted through P2P channels and dollar-backed stablecoins, which are often preferred over volatile cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ether for payments, remittances, and savings. Under the rules, stablecoin issuers will now be required to hold KES 300 million ($2.3 million) in paid-up capital, a 40% reduction from the KES 500 million ($3.85 million) requirement proposed in the draft regulations released in March. The lower capital threshold could make it easier for firms seeking to issue stablecoins under Kenyan regulation. However, the new rules make clear that access to foreign stablecoins in Kenya will no longer be determined solely by existing on global blockchains, but by whether the CBK permits licenced local intermediaries to continue offering them to Kenyan users. True scale demands moving beyond surface-level integrations to robust execution. We’ve filtered the noise out of Moonshot 2026, optimising the conference strictly for high-calibre connections between startup founders, global financial operators, enterprise leaders and individuals rewiring Africa’s technical frameworks. Get 20% off Early Bird tickets for a limited time.
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Nigeria no longer has a payments problem. It has a trust problem. That is the central argument of a new report by Bridgforte, a policy research institute, published in partnership with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Innovation Hub in Lagos, which argues that confidence in Nigeria’s financial system is now determined less by how quickly money moves than by how reliably the system responds when something goes wrong. The country processed more than ₦1.2 quadrillion ($880.51 billion) worth of transactions in 2025, according to the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), making it one of the world’s busiest real-time payment markets. But as digital payments become the default way millions of Nigerians move money, a different challenge is emerging. Success has exposed the system’s weakest point: trust. “Service reliability and dispute resolution are the primary drivers of confidence erosion, far outweighing concerns about fraud, data privacy, and artificial intelligence,” the report stated. After decades of expanding access to financial services, policymakers are now asking a different question: not whether Nigerians can make digital payments, but whether they trust the system enough to keep using it. Since establishing the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System Plc in 1993, Nigeria has invested in payment rails, digital identity, fintech regulation and real-time settlement infrastructure. Those investments have helped create a financial ecosystem that processes billions of transactions each year. Formal financial inclusion has risen alongside that infrastructure. According to Enhancing Financial Innovation and Access (EFInA)’s 2023 Access to Financial Services Survey, 64% of Nigerian adults now use formal financial services, reflecting years of expansion by banks, fintech companies and mobile payment providers. Aishah Ahmad, founder of Bridgforte and former Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), told TechCabal that infrastructure alone cannot produce confidence. “One of our essential ideas is that trust in financial services is an architectural outcome of the system,” she said. “We have to create governance frameworks that produce and sustain trust consistently because of how interconnected the financial system has become.” As transaction volumes increase and more consumers depend on digital finance for everyday activities, failures become more visible and more costly. “The fundamentals of banking are about trust,” said Uzoma Dozie, chief executive officer of Sparkle, a Nigerian fintech, during a panel discussion at the report’s launch on Tuesday. Consumers relate with one financial system One of the report’s central arguments is that trust failures are operational before they become technological. A single digital payment can pass through identity verification services, payment switches, banks, fintech applications, payment gateways, merchants and application programming interfaces (APIs) before reaching its destination. To consumers, it is only a single transaction. “Customers experience the financial system not as an institution, but as a collective,” Ahmad said. “If they engage with one institution and are unhappy, it erodes their confidence in the entire system.” Whether a failed payment originated from a bank, payment switch, fintech platform or network provider matters little to the consumer. What remains is the memory of a failed transfer, delayed reversal or unresolved complaint. The report argues that this explains why operational failures increasingly shape public confidence more than emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence. CBN is making trust a policy objective The regulator has reached a similar conclusion. The CBN anchored its payment vision for 2028 on six guiding principles, including trust. The regulator argues that Nigeria’s challenge is no longer just expanding digital access but also strengthening consumer confidence in the systems people already use. An Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) survey published in 2024 found that 84% of consumers experienced at least one challenge while using digital financial services. Poor network quality affected 44% of respondents, while unexpected charges and fraud each affected 23%. “In all, Nigeria’s PSV 2025 expanded digital access but exposed weaknesses in redress, literacy, and high fraud losses, showing that inclusion without trust is fragile,” the PSV read. To address that challenge, the regulator has set an ambitious target of achieving an 80% trust index score by 2028. It also plans to introduce quarterly public scorecards alongside a National Payments Trust Index to measure confidence in the financial system. Trust has become an economic issue Ahmad notes that if trust is not fixed, everyone in the financial ecosystem pays for it. “Access has advanced,” she said. “But as you succeed, you start to see patterns in your success. People are engaging with the system, but they are not doing that consistently, and usage could be better.” Diane Karusisi, chief executive officer of Bank of Kigali, Rwanda’s largest commercial bank, argued that trust is ultimately built during moments of failure rather than success. “Access to finance is not an end in itself. What we want is outcomes. We want people to grow, to start building wealth,” she said during the panel discussion. “Trust is earned when there is a failure, and you are able to walk through the failure with your customers.” Trust determines whether digital finance becomes habitual. Consumers who expect failed transfers or lengthy dispute resolution are more likely to keep cash, avoid unfamiliar financial products or revert to physical channels. Over time, that weakens transaction volumes, slows financial inclusion and reduces the return on years of investment in digital infrastructure. “When it goes wrong, we see a lot of wasted investments,” Ahmad said. “Who pays for a lack of confidence? Today, we all do. In some of the challenges we see about cash usage and the lack of confidence.” To fix some of the trust issues existing in the financial space, she argues that collaboration must now extend beyond building shared infrastructure to include fraud intelligence, cybersecurity, operational resilience and dispute resolution, areas where failures at one institution increasingly affect confidence across the entire ecosystem. “The coordination that got us here has to evolve with the interconnected system we see today,” Ahmad said. Bridgforte also recommended creating a longitudinal trust barometer that tracks what strengthens and weakens consumer confidence over time. “We have recommended that we do a longitudinal barometer
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