Central Bank of Kenya

The profile

Kenya's central bank, established by Act of Parliament on 24 March 1966 and open to the public from 14 September 1966, now entrenched in Article 231 of the Constitution with responsibility for monetary policy, banking sector stability, currency issue and the national payment system. Under the Virtual Asset Service Providers Regulations gazetted on 24 July 2026 as Legal Notice No. 134, it licenses and supervises virtual-asset-to-fiat conversion services and stablecoin issuers, while the Capital Markets Authority takes exchanges, token issuance platforms, initial coin offerings and tokenisation. The draft it consulted on to 10 April 2026 required stablecoin issuers to hold at least 30% of funds received in segregated accounts at Kenyan commercial banks and to confine the remainder to high-quality liquid assets (cash, central bank and bank deposits, government securities of 90 days or less and repo of no more than seven days), which ties a shilling token's reserves to the domestic bill market and to local bank credit risk.