Stablecon Salons Kigali:
Kigali: Right on Time?
I was at the airport when I read it.
Rwanda’s Cabinet had just approved a draft law to regulate virtual assets. Capital Market Authority designated as regulator. Licensing framework for VASPs. Full collateralisation requirements for stablecoin issuers. The day before I flew to Kigali.
I put my phone in my pocket and thought: the timing on this trip is not accidental.
The Work Was Already Done
The VASP law didn’t come from nowhere.
The National Bank of Rwanda has been running a regulatory sandbox with 17 live companies. In February 2026, they launched eKash, connecting 22 financial institutions, settling transfers in under 15 seconds at fees as low as Rwf 250. A CBDC pilot is underway. Kigali ranks third in Africa on the Global Financial Centres Index.
A sandbox without a legal framework is an experiment. A legal framework without infrastructure is a press release. Rwanda now has both and the draft VASP law passed Cabinet the day before our salon opened.
Monday: Even the Rain Couldn’t Stop Us
$54 billion in remittances into Africa annually. $95 billion in bank-to-mobile transfers. East Africa at the centre of some of the most active cross-border corridors on the continent.
That was my opening. The people in the room already knew the numbers they’re the ones responsible for what those numbers become next.
And the room was serious. Tether, Binance, Utila as ecosystem partners. Rwanda ICT Chamber and Rwanda Blockchain Association as community partners. Operators, compliance leads, treasury practitioners, and institutional players whose daily work is the infrastructure behind those flows.
We had people come through the door, in the rain and the Rwanda Broadcasting Agency were on the ground covering it, showing these conversations are landing beyond the room.
None of it happens without the people who built the ground beneath it. Divine Muragijimana at GFTN showed up from the moment I landed making introductions, bringing the right people through the door. Hervé-Frédéric Rugwizangoga and Armand Muganga at KIFC opened doors into the ecosystem before the evening even started. Landing in a new city and building a room from scratch is never easy. That kind of support is what makes this series possible.
The evening ran two conversations from the people building the rails, and from the institutions shaping the environment those rails run through.
Session 1: What’s Actually Running
Arnoud d’Yve de Bavay of Tether and Saruni Maina of Binance on the infrastructure side. I opened with the ground truth.
USDT didn’t become the de facto settlement layer across African corridors because of a marketing campaign. I asked Arnoud what operators were actually trying to solve and whether that organic foundation is genuinely solid, or whether the infrastructure conversation has quietly diverged from the use-case conversation.
“Stablecoins didn’t gain traction in Africa because of hype; they were used because of real-life applications. People and businesses needed a faster, more reliable way to move value across fragmented markets. That organic demand is what makes this infrastructure credible and sustainable.”
To Saruni: when East African businesses start using digital assets for trade or treasury, what are they typically underprepared for?
Two things, both consistently underestimated. First, the on-ramp hustle. Businesses assume getting stablecoins into their treasury through banking channels is straightforward. Many defer holding stables entirely and convert on-need instead which usually ends up being neither safer nor cheaper. The friction of on and off-ramping via banks often rivals the legacy rails they were trying to leave behind.
Second, compliance reach. Stablecoins are borderless. Compliance isn’t. Accounts get flagged. Transactions get frozen. Banks request explanations for flows that look unusual to systems built for a different era.
With operator sophistication now materially higher more complex use cases, larger volumes, higher counterparty expectations; I asked Arnoud what the next phase of infrastructure actually needs to look like.
“As operators become more sophisticated, the expectations shift; it’s no longer just about speed, but about reliability, transparency, and seamless integration with existing financial systems. That’s what the next phase of stablecoin infrastructure needs to deliver.”
The first wave was won on speed. The next will be won on depth.
On what catches even prepared companies off guard, Saruni named the crafty customer. KYC built, transaction monitoring live, compliance frameworks in place. Then a customer transacts with funds whose source is unclear, or an API client’s end user doesn’t receive value and suddenly you’re implicated in a problem you didn’t create. The perimeter was solid. The problem came from somewhere else.
On regulators: the companies that navigate this well show up before they need to. Transparently, consistently, before there’s anything at stake. The ones that don’t tend to find out why that mattered at the worst possible time.
Session 2: What Tokenisation of Real-World Assets Unlocks for East Africa
Norbert Haguma, Chairman of the Rwanda Blockchain Association and Founder of Swapinga, alongside Jerome Ndayambaje of the Capital Market Authority the body that will oversee licensing and supervision of virtual asset service providers once the framework is enacted and Larry Cooke, Head of Legal Africa at Binance.
Imagine a formal sector worker in Kigali earning $220 a month. Their options are a 5% bank savings rate or the informal economy’s 30-40% returns from moto ownership with all the risk and illiquidity that comes with it. Norbert described a third option: invest $200 into a fractional ownership token for an electric vehicle pool, receive daily yield from driver payments, and after five years the driver owns the vehicle outright.
He described where Rwanda’s builder community actually stands right now with one phrase: we are entering a post-regulatory phase.
What he meant was precise. The draft law provides specific provisions for tokenisation of real-world assets 100% collateralisation, accredited valuation, professional custody. It addresses stablecoin issuance with reserve asset segregation and independent verification. And it establishes a cooperation framework between CMA and the National Bank to ensure virtual assets don’t create systemic risk. Builders can now design businesses around what they will be licensed to do not just what the technology allows.
But Norbert was equally direct about where the friction actually sits and it’s not where most people look.
Not at the technology layer. With the draft law advancing, increasingly not at the regulatory layer either. The friction sits at two places that rarely get discussed in rooms like this one.
First, the banking layer. You can tokenise an asset, you’ll soon have a licence to do so but if the compliance team at a commercial bank has no internal policy for handling digital asset clients, the builder hits a wall that has nothing to do with code or law. The conversation that needs more oxygen is the one between blockchain founders and bank compliance officers. Rwanda has the regulatory clarity. What it now needs is banks that move at the same speed.
Second, the professional services gap. The law requires tokenised assets to be valued by accredited valuation authorities and held by qualified custodians. Those roles don’t exist in Rwanda at the scale the law will demand. Someone has to build that layer the accredited valuators, the qualified custodians, the licensed on/off-ramp agents, the compliance-as-a-service providers. Norbert called this the Tokenisation Services Layer. Not five licensed platforms. Fifty service providers around them.
The insight that landed hardest: Rwanda has over 80,000 mobile money agent points reaching every corner of the country. The infrastructure for last-mile fiat distribution already exists. The regulatory and operational upgrade from mobile money agent to licensed stablecoin on/off-ramp agent is smaller than most people assume. That’s not a futuristic vision. It’s an upgrade to infrastructure that’s already running.
Tuesday: The Question That Needed to Be Asked Out Loud
I walked onto the IFF stage the following evening with one question and put it to the room.
Is the financial infrastructure meant to power innovation across East Africa being built by accident or by design?
Alice Anangi of Equity Bank, Benjamin Karenzi of IT Consortium Rwanda and Lionel Ngendakuriyo of the Rwanda Social Security Board didn’t let it stay comfortable.
Lionel was candid about the RSSB’s new 42 billion RWF ($32 million) SME fund and what it actually takes to deploy patient capital well. Institutional money at that scale doesn’t move because the opportunity exists. It moves when the compliance frameworks, disbursement channels, and monitoring architecture are built to handle it. Getting that right isn’t a footnote. It’s the whole job.
Alice spoke about Equity Bank’s evolving approach to founders; a hybrid model designed to close the gap between what entrepreneurs need and what traditional banking offers. She committed personally to keeping these conversations alive for the next 12 months.
What I kept thinking, sitting in that room: without public sector participation, without policy that moves with the market, the friction doesn’t disappear. It just gets worked around. And working around friction has a cost in time, in capital efficiency, in the quality of businesses that survive long enough to scale.
What Both Days Were Really About
Monday was about the rails, the infrastructure that moves value across corridors, and the compliance layer that has to sit on top of it. Tuesday was about what happens at the other end of those rails, the capital, the institutions, the policy frameworks that determine whether businesses built on this infrastructure can actually grow.
They’re the same problem from opposite ends. Arnoud’s point about the next phase reliability, transparency, seamless integration, is exactly what the RSSB needs to see before deploying patient capital into digital-native businesses.
Africa deserves infrastructure built by design, not by accident. The people in both rooms are building exactly that.
Rwanda moved from a central bank warning institutions away from crypto in 2023 to a Cabinet-approved VASP framework in 2026, without the chaos that characterised that transition elsewhere. Deliberate, sequenced building. The city is proof that design is possible.
I’ll leave the last word to Norbert. When I asked what needs to have moved by the time we return to Kigali in 2027 for tonight to have been more than a good evening, he didn’t hesitate.
The Virtual Assets Law is enacted. At least five of Africa’s top fintech companies are building their stablecoins from Rwanda. We have a functioning Tokenisation Services Layer, local accredited valuators, qualified custodians, licensed on/off-ramp agents.
That’s the bar. And I believe Kigali is already in motion toward it.
Nairobi showed me what the series could be.
Kigali is teaching me we just might be on to something…
If the conversations in Kigali left you wanting to go deeper, I recently published a white paper The Next Phase of Global Money Movement: An Operator’s 2026 Outlook on Liquidity, Control, and Infrastructure Through Africa that expands on a lot of what was discussed here.
Who Made This Possible
The Kigali edition of Stablecon Salons was made possible by our ecosystem partners who are each building infrastructure at the heart of the stablecoin economy.
Binance is the world’s largest crypto exchange by trading volume, with one of the most active Africa operations in the industry. From regulatory engagement to local market development, Binance has been a consistent presence across the continent’s digital asset ecosystem.
Utila is a digital asset infrastructure platform built for fintechs and payment companies managing stablecoin flows at scale. Its modular approach letting companies assemble and switch between custody, compliance, liquidity, and yield providers rather than being locked into a single stack is designed for operators who have outgrown their first-generation setup.
Tether: Pioneer in stablecoin technology and creator of USDT, the world’s largest and most liquid stablecoin. Tether is building accessible financial, AI, and energy infrastructure that bridges traditional finance and decentralized systems with a particular focus on empowering underserved communities across Africa and beyond.