How to choose your VASP category (and why it sets your capital)
Before capital, policies or fees mean anything, you have to know which box you are in. Kenya, Brazil and the United Kingdom all decide that box by what a firm does rather than by what it calls itself, and each then hangs something quite different off the answer.
Brazil: three categories, and the label is not yours to choose
Resolucao BCB no 520, article 4, sets out three categories: intermediario (intermediary), custodiante (custodian) and corretora (broker, meaning intermediation and custody carried on together). The test is functional. A firm that matches client orders and also holds client keys is a corretora, whatever its marketing says, and the authorisation procedure in Instrucao Normativa BCB no 704 runs off that classification.
Category matters in Brazil because capital is calculated rather than looked up. The arithmetic sits in the annexes to Resolucao Conjunta no 14/2025 read with Resolucao BCB no 517/2025, and one of its inputs is the number of registered operational categories. Adding a category changes the calculation; it does not simply add a second licence fee. Worked examples circulate in published law-firm commentary, but the annexes govern, and the component values are not reported consistently. Treat any single figure you see as an illustration and run the calculation on your own facts.
Kenya: the category picks your regulator before it picks your capital
The First Schedule to the Virtual Asset Service Providers Act, 2025 carries a Responsible Relevant Regulatory Authority column. The Central Bank of Kenya takes wallet providers, virtual asset payment processors and stablecoin issuers. The Capital Markets Authority takes exchanges, brokers, investment advisers, virtual asset managers, ICO providers, tokenisation providers and token issuance platforms.
That split is the first thing to settle, because a group that runs an exchange and also holds client assets in a wallet is read by both authorities, against two different rulebooks, out of one application file.
Two activities in Kenya is not two licences worth of capital
Regulation 85(6) of the Virtual Asset Service Providers Regulations (Legal Notice No. 134 of 2026) sets a rule that planning spreadsheets get wrong in one of two directions. A licensee undertaking more than one permissible activity holds the paid-up capital of the highest-capital category plus fifty per cent of the paid-up capital for each additional activity. It is not the sum of the categories, and it is not the highest category alone.
Worked from the Fifth Schedule as gazetted, an exchange (KSh 100,000,000) plus a wallet provider (KSh 150,000,000) is KSh 150,000,000 plus KSh 50,000,000, so KSh 200,000,000. Those paid-up figures are instrument text, from the Fifth Schedule headed Capital and Liquidity Requirements. Regulation 85(7) then allows the authority to raise the requirement by risk profile, so the schedule is a floor rather than a ceiling; how that uplift will be applied in practice is still open.
The UK does not ask you to pick a category at all
The Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (Cryptoassets) Regulations 2026 (SI 2026/102) insert a new Chapter 2B into the Regulated Activities Order. There is no menu of firm types. There are activity heads, in articles 9M, 9N, 9S, 9T, 9W, 9Y and 9Z6, and a firm needs a permission for each head it carries on.
Published counts of those heads differ, and both counts are defensible. Seven articles specify activities, but article 9N(1) has two limbs and article 9Y has two paragraphs, each expressed as a specified kind of activity, which is how commentators reach nine. Firms citing seven and firms citing nine are counting the same text differently. What matters for an application is which limbs you touch, not the headline number.
Two structural features change the answer for real firms:
- The heads do not stack automatically. Articles 9V(2), 9X(2) and 9Z5(2) carve articles 9M, 9S and 9Z6 out of the dealing and arranging heads.
- Eighteen of the twenty-five articles in Chapter 2B are exclusions rather than activities. Article 9Z10 excludes activity carried on by a supplier to a customer for the purpose of selling goods or supplying services. Article 9Z9 excludes staking technical services, including the operation of a validator node, where the person does not hold out to the public. Article 9Z11 excludes activity incidental to a supervised profession, on four cumulative conditions.
Capital follows the same non-stacking logic. The FCA permanent minimum requirements apply by activity: GBP 75,000 for dealing as agent and for arranging, GBP 150,000 for operating a trading platform, staking and safeguarding, GBP 350,000 for stablecoin issuance and GBP 750,000 for dealing as principal. The highest applicable figure applies rather than the sum, and own funds are the higher of that figure, the fixed overheads requirement and the K-factor requirement.
Three questions that settle it
- Do you hold anything belonging to a client, whether keys, assets or backing? That answer alone moves you between Brazilian categories, adds a Kenyan activity and engages UK article 9N.
- Is any instrument you touch already a specified investment? Article 9N is titled safeguarding of qualifying cryptoassets and relevant specified investment cryptoassets, so a tokenised-securities custodian is inside the UK custody head even though tokenised securities are excluded from the qualifying cryptoasset definition in article 88F.
- Which activity is incidental to something else you sell? In the UK that may fall inside an exclusion. In Kenya and Brazil it is generally still a category.
The most common classification error
It is describing the business the way the market describes it. Exchange, custody platform and wallet are commercial words. Resolucao BCB no 520 article 4, the Kenyan First Schedule and Chapter 2B of the Regulated Activities Order are not reading your website. Write down each thing the business actually does, including who holds what, who matches what and who promotes what, then map that list to the instrument before you cost anything.
The checklist behind this article
We keep a readiness checklist for each of the three regimes. Every item is cited to a rule, regulation or article number, every figure is marked as instrument text or as reporting of it, and the questions that are genuinely open are marked open rather than quietly answered. Kenya, USD 79, Brazil, USD 79, United Kingdom, USD 149. Updated editions are free as the position develops.
If your firm carries on one clear activity in one market, the checklist is enough on its own and you do not need us. If you are carrying on more than one activity, straddling two Kenyan regulators, or unsure whether a UK exclusion catches you, the 48-hour gap check at this link works through your specific facts.