Stablecon Salons Nairobi:
Kenya Is Done Waiting. Now Comes the Hard Part.
Kenya signed its Virtual Asset Service Providers Act into law three months ago. On February 10th, the people who have to live with that decision gathered in Nairobi to talk about what comes next.
Part of what made the evening feel different was who was in the room. Utila, Binance, Remitly, Stitch, Tether, CrissCross, M-Pesa, The Capital Markets Authority, Cellulant, Thunes, Paystack, Yellow Card, AZA Finance, Flourish Ventures, Base, Kotani Pay, Sling Money and that’s not even the full list.
These aren’t observers, they’re the people actually moving money across the continent, making licensing decisions, writing compliance frameworks, and building the infrastructure that millions of people depend on. When a room like that fills up on a Monday evening, something real is happening.
The evening split into two sessions. The fireside chat Kenya’s Crypto Regulatory Landscape: Past, Present & Future dealt with the policy architecture that has been slowly, and then suddenly, taking shape. The panel Treasury in Transition: Building Teams for the Stablecoin Era brought it down to the operational level, where regulation becomes infrastructure becomes headcount. Both sessions kept returning to the same underlying question: Kenya has done the hard work of building a framework. What happens now?
Fireside Chat: The Long Road to the VASP Act
Gwera Kiwana moderated a conversation between two people who have spent years pushing this ecosystem forward from the inside. S.A. Kakai is a Director at the Virtual Assets Chamber of Commerce and Legal Counsel at Steakhouse Financial, a boutique digital assets advisory firm working at the intersection of DeFi and traditional finance. Robert Muoka is CEO of the Virtual Assets Association of Kenya and a Senior Partner at T.M.M & Partners Advocates a lawyer who also runs the most important industry body in Kenya’s digital asset space. The two of them have seen this story from nearly every angle.
Kakai took the room back to 2015, when the CBK issued a public circular calling Bitcoin risky and not legal tender. Banks followed suit immediately terminating accounts, cutting off on-ramp providers like BitPesa, treating anything crypto-adjacent as a liability. It wasn’t a ban, but it had the effect of one. The industry survived by going peer-to-peer. Years of that followed: cautionary notices, a court ruling on CMA’s investor-protection mandate, a tokenisation sandbox that only opened its doors to crypto in 2024. The turning point, Kakai said, was Kenya landing on the FATF grey list. That made doing nothing expensive in a way that regulatory inertia hadn’t been before.
The result was the VASP Act, signed into law on November 4, 2025. It’s a real piece of legislation dual oversight from CBK and CMA, clear licensing categories, AML obligations, fit-and-proper requirements. The subsidiary regulations are being drafted now, with public participation in March and April. If the timeline holds, VASPs could start getting licensed by June or July.
Muoka put Kenya’s path in regional context. Nigeria moved fast and chaotically enormous P2P volumes, banking bans that pushed adoption rather than killing it, eventually a pivot to SEC licensing that made the country one of the world’s leading stablecoin markets. South Africa went institutional early, classifying crypto under FAIS and building a licensing regime with real depth. Kenya was slower, more deliberate, more anchored to its mobile money strengths. That deliberateness, Muoka argued, is now an advantage.
“That caution bought time to learn from others’ pitfalls. The question is whether the implementation phase can match the ambition of the law.”
The multi-regulator reality came up as one of the more practically thorny topics of the evening. CBK, CMA, KRA, the Communications Authority, NIFCA the landscape is layered, and knowing which door to knock on first isn’t always obvious. Muoka was measured but honest about the friction. VAAK’s response has been to build the connective tissue: roundtables, compliance templates, collective advocacy so operators aren’t navigating ambiguity alone. NIFCA plays a different role not a regulator, but a convener and incentive-builder, working to make Nairobi the obvious choice for global firms looking for an African base.
Kakai used the stablecoin question to show where the work is still unfinished. The VASP Act doesn’t clearly differentiate between payment stablecoins and asset-referenced ones, or between what applies to a local issuer versus a foreign one. The Chamber is pushing for modular, sector-specific rules something closer to the approach in the US GENIUS Act rather than one-size-fits-all licensing that makes no distinction between an exchange, a custodian, and a payment processor.
When Gwera asked both speakers to describe what success looks like in February 2027, Muoka gave the most concrete answer of the night. Licensed providers operating openly. Tokenized real estate and money market funds running through CMA sandboxes. Stablecoin remittances growing without destabilizing the shilling. KRA with a tax framework that rewards compliance rather than driving it underground.
“Kenya solidified as Africa’s digital finance gateway not as aspiration but as something measurable. The next six to twelve months will determine whether that framing is prescient or premature.”
Panel: Who Actually Runs the Treasury?
I moderated the second session, which brought together Jack Chong, CEO of Checker; Paz van Gelder, BD & Partnerships at Utila; Larry Cooke, Head of Legal Africa at Binance; and Joan Gachanja, FX Manager Africa at Thunes. The conversation ranged across infrastructure, legal complexity, and operational reality with each panelist bringing a different vantage point to the same set of challenges.
The framing was deliberate. A lot of the stablecoin conversation happens at the infrastructure and policy level which tools exist, what the regulations say. Less attention goes to the people inside companies who are supposed to operate these systems day to day. Treasury managers. Compliance officers. FX leads. The session was an attempt to surface that layer.
Paz opened with something that landed immediately. Utila works with fintechs at every stage of stablecoin maturity, and the variance is enormous. Some companies arrive having never touched a stablecoin and just wanting to understand whether the use-case is real.
For them, Utila provides the minimum viable stack everything they need to start processing flows without sourcing and stitching together providers from scratch. Other companies arrive having already proven the use-case, but now stuck. They got to market fast by going with a bundled black box provider, and it worked until volume grew and the inflexibility of that setup started costing them. Can’t swap a liquidity provider. Can’t add a compliance vendor for a new jurisdiction. Can’t integrate yield without the whole thing needing to be rebuilt.
For those companies, Utila’s pitch is what it calls Stablecoins 2.0: own your stack, choose your providers, switch when you need to. Utila Link is the mechanism a partner network across compliance, liquidity, yield, and more, designed to be modular rather than monolithic. It’s a meaningful shift in how infrastructure is conceived, from a product you buy to a system you configure.
But the part of Paz’s contribution that I kept thinking about afterward was the internal capability argument. Great infrastructure doesn’t replace the need for people who understand it. Treasury managers and compliance officers who know how the pieces fit together who the admin is, who can authorize what, what AML/KYT checks are required and when aren’t a nice-to-have. They’re the counterpart to the external stack without which the whole thing breaks down.
“Owning the stack isn’t just about choosing better technology. It requires the internal readiness to operate it.”
That readiness, he argued, is what separates companies that scale from companies that plateau. The ones that succeed tend to have mapped the full provider landscape before committing understanding the tradeoffs across custody, compliance, and liquidity rather than defaulting to the biggest name.
They also tend to run periodic check-ups on their setup, rather than treating vendor selection as a one-time decision. The ones that struggle often find out their infrastructure can’t support them at the worst possible moment: during a compliance audit or when they’re trying to enter a new market.
“Audit what you have today your existing payments infrastructure, your licenses, your internal team’s readiness because you can’t decide what to build or buy until you know where you actually stand.”
But the sharpest contribution of the evening came from someone who wasn’t selling infrastructure at all. Joan Gachanja from Thunes brought the most grounded perspective of the evening not a founder’s pitch or an infrastructure provider’s framework, but a practitioner’s account of what actually happened when stablecoins entered a live FX operation.
When I asked her what broke first in the transition, her answer caught the room off guard. Nothing broke. The opposite happened. ‘Work became significantly easier,’ she said. Settlement that used to take hours sometimes days now happens in under three minutes. That speed didn’t just change the metrics; it changed how her team thinks about liquidity, reconciliation, and partner relationships entirely.
The thing they weren’t prepared for wasn’t a failure it was the sudden collapse of manual workload. Because stablecoin transactions settle instantly and transparently on-chain, the back-and-forth confirmations, payment tracking, and reconciliation overhead that used to consume the operations team’s time simply... stopped. ‘We navigated an upgrade, not a breakdown,’ she said. The team shifted focus from chasing payments and managing float to higher-value work.
The hardest adaptation, Joan said, wasn’t technical. It was psychological. For someone coming from traditional FX, the biggest learning curve is unlearning the concept of banking hours and cut-off times. In traditional FX, everything revolves around settlement windows, correspondent banking chains, and whether you hit the deadline. Liquidity planning is built around business days and time zones. With stablecoins, that structure disappears entirely 24/7, no weekends, no delayed Monday settlements.
“Treasury stops being cyclical and becomes real-time. Once that mindset shift happens, the operational efficiency gains are significant.”
On what she’d prioritize for operators starting this journey: invest in automation early. Don’t bolt stablecoins onto manual workflows. Thunes automated reconciliation and built real-time treasury visibility from day one, which is what allowed them to scale quickly and capture the full benefit of instant settlement rather than just moving the same slow processes onto faster rails.
Then there was Larry Cooke. When you spend your days navigating financial regulation across multiple African jurisdictions for the world’s largest crypto exchange, you develop a particular kind of patience for people who are still asking the wrong questions.
The first wrong question, he said, is waiting for stablecoin-specific regulation before moving. Legal landscapes are ecosystems. Most existing laws already apply. The companies that figure that out early move; the ones that wait for a perfect framework that will never arrive end up watching from the sideline.
The second is assuming Africa is one regulatory market. It isn’t. The end goals across countries may rhyme, but the maturity of regulators, their resources, their interdependencies all completely different. The playbook that worked in Nigeria will not simply transfer to Kenya. Stablecoins inherit every layer of that complexity.
What he kept coming back to, though, was something less obvious. It’s not really about the licenses. It’s about education building understanding across all the stakeholders who need to be on board for a use case to actually work. Execution is a team sport.
“You need the right squad, engage the referees respectfully, and make sure management doesn’t have conflicting tactics.”
The piece that rarely gets discussed: local currency controls and the macroeconomic consequences of stablecoin adoption. Corporations think about efficiency. Regulators think about stability and sovereignty. Both are legitimate. The companies that last are the ones that understand the regulator’s mandate not just their own.
“Stablecoins can be a tool, a resource, or a measurement depending on whose hands it’s in.”
On finding legal and compliance talent with genuine hybrid expertise across traditional finance and digital assets — Larry didn’t sugarcoat it. True experts are still being made. The market is growing, particularly in South Africa, Nigeria, and Kenya, but people who can hit the ground running on day one are rare. Impressive CVs are easy to manufacture. Character is harder to fake. And the consequences of getting it wrong in financial services have always been costly.
The last thing he said about regulator relationships was the most honest. Contention isn’t always negative regulators are suspicious of companies that agree with everything. What matters is being measured, being transparent about your business model, and taking the regulator on the journey with you rather than presenting them with a fait accompli.
“Being economical with important facts will always backfire. Without integrity the financial system will collapse.”
What Both Sessions Were Really About
The regulation conversation and the infrastructure conversation sound like different topics. One is about law and policy; the other is about technology and operations. But sitting across both sessions, the through line was hard to miss.
Kenya has done something genuinely difficult: it built a legal framework for digital assets from scratch, navigated a multi-regulator environment without creating new bureaucracy, and held the line on implementation timelines that most countries in similar positions have slipped. The companies building on top of that framework are working through their own version of the same challenge moving from a scrappy first setup to something that can actually hold weight at scale.
In both cases, the hard part isn’t the architecture. It’s the execution. The regulations are written; now they have to be implemented. The infrastructure exists; now companies have to build the internal capability to use it properly. The opportunity is real; now someone has to do the work.
On my way to my hotel that evening, I kept thinking about what Joan said, “nothing broke and work just got easier”. That’s the inversion and sitting in that room, watching the people who actually have to execute on all of these: the lawyers, the FX managers, the infrastructure builders; I kept thinking: we’re not at the beginning anymore. We’re at the part where it gets real.
The debate is over, the frameworks are being written, the infrastructure is there. What’s left is the hardest thing; the people, the processes, the mindset. The unglamorous work of turning possibility into operations.
Kenya showed me that room exists and that people are ready to be in it.
Kigali next and Six more stops on the way.
If the conversations in Nairobi 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 Nairobi 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.
Checker is building a global liquidity network for stablecoins, offering API infrastructure that routes orders to the optimal provider based on price, speed, and reliability
Stablecon Salons is a series of intimate gatherings for operators, builders, and policymakers working on the future of cross-border payments and digital finance across Africa. The series spans eight cities.