Two permissions, one balance sheet: Kenya's reg. 85(6) multi-activity capital rule
The Fifth Schedule to the Virtual Asset Service Providers Regulations 2026 (Legal Notice No. 134 of 2026) prints as a clean table: ten activity categories against two columns of capital. It reads like a price list, and most summaries reproduce it as one. For any firm doing more than one thing it is not a price list, because regulation 85(6) changes the arithmetic and regulation 85(6) is not in the table.
The rule
Regulation 85(6) provides that 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. That is neither of the two answers firms usually reach for. It is not the sum of the categories. It is not the highest category alone.
The distinction is worth real money in both directions. A firm that budgeted the sum has over-provisioned; a firm that budgeted the highest category alone is short, and will find out at the point where the capital has to be certified rather than estimated.
Worked from the Fifth Schedule
The Fifth Schedule, headed "Capital and Liquidity Requirements" and referenced to rules 6(2)(h), 85(2)(a), 85(3) and 85(12), sets paid-up capital in Kenya shillings. Among the categories:
- Wallet provider: KSh 150,000,000
- Exchange: KSh 100,000,000
- Virtual asset manager, ICO provider, token issuance platform: KSh 20,000,000 each
- Broker, virtual asset payment processor, tokenisation provider: KSh 10,000,000 each
- Investment adviser: NIL
- Stablecoin issuance: KSh 300,000,000
Apply 85(6). An exchange that also provides custodial wallets holds KSh 150,000,000 as the highest category, plus half of the exchange requirement, KSh 50,000,000: total KSh 200,000,000. Not 250,000,000, and not 150,000,000. Add a broker permission to that pair and it rises by KSh 5,000,000. A broker that also manages and advises holds KSh 20,000,000 for the manager category plus KSh 5,000,000 for the broker, with the adviser adding nothing, because half of nil is nil.
Those figures are the schedule as gazetted. They are also the figures most likely to be misquoted, because the National Treasury draft of March 2026 is still downloadable and still circulating, and seven of the ten paid-up categories fell between the draft and the gazette — several by 80 to 95 per cent. Check which document any number you were given came from.
The schedule is a floor, not a ceiling
Regulation 85(7) allows the authority to raise the requirement by reference to the licensee's risk profile. Whatever 85(6) produces is a minimum. How the uplift will be applied in practice has not been published; carry it as an open item in the capital plan rather than treating it as theoretical.
What 85(6) does not tell you
Regulation 85(6) speaks to paid-up capital. The second column of the Fifth Schedule, liquid capital, is a separate set of per-category tests: an 8 per cent of total liabilities test with a cash floor for the exchange, broker, manager, ICO, tokenisation and token issuance platform categories, and a 30-day current-liabilities coverage test for the wallet, payment processor and stablecoin categories. The wallet figure is KSh 30,000,000 or 100 per cent of current liabilities for at least 30 days, whichever is higher. The payment processor has the coverage test with no cash floor at all.
On our reading of the regulations, they do not spell out how the liquid-capital limb aggregates across activities in the way 85(6) does for paid-up capital. Do not assume it mirrors 85(6), and do not assume it does not. Put the question to the supervising authority and record the answer, because for a growing multi-activity firm the liquid-capital limb, not the paid-up figure, is usually the one that binds first.
Fees do not follow the same rule
The First Schedule (rules 5(1), 6(2)(u), 7, 11(3)(b), 13(1), 29(2), 49(2)(g), 61(2)(c) and 62(2)(h)) sets application and licence fees per category: KSh 100,000 application and KSh 1,000,000 licence for an exchange, KSh 100,000 and KSh 500,000 for a wallet provider, KSh 10,000 and KSh 50,000 for an investment adviser. There is no 85(6)-style discount anywhere in the fee schedule. Budget fees per activity and capital under 85(6).
Two regulators read the same file
The First Schedule to the Virtual Asset Service Providers Act 2025 allocates supervision by activity in its "Responsible Relevant Regulatory Authority" column: the Central Bank of Kenya for wallet providers, virtual asset payment processors and stablecoin issuance; the Capital Markets Authority for exchanges, brokers, investment advisers, virtual asset managers, ICO providers, tokenisation providers and token issuance platforms. The exchange-plus-wallet firm in the worked example above is thus a CMA firm and a CBK firm at the same time, filing one set of policies into two houses of style. That is a drafting problem as much as a capital one.
Where this sits in the timetable
The deadline is 4 November 2026, set by section 47 of the Virtual Asset Service Providers Act 2025 (Act No. 20 of 2025). Legal Notice 134 runs to 116 pages and 151 regulations across six schedules, made on 3 July 2026 and published in Kenya Gazette Supplement No. 185 (Special Issue 4253), Legislative Supplement No. 103, of 22 July 2026. Read end to end, it contains no transitional provision, no savings clause and no deemed-licensing regulation. The application window had not opened when this was written and the application form has not been published. Capital under 85(6) is nonetheless the item to settle first, because raising and certifying it takes months, not weeks.
The checklist behind this article
The Kenya VASP readiness checklist is a document you can work through before the window opens: category selection, the 85(6) calculation for multi-activity firms, the nine operational policies under reg. 6(2)(f), the First Schedule fees and the Third Schedule business-plan deliverables. Every item is cited to a regulation or section number, every figure is marked as gazette text or as reporting of it, and open questions — the window, the form, the reg. 85(7) uplift — are marked as open rather than guessed. USD 79, with the updated edition free as the position develops.
If you are applying for a single category, the checklist covers it and you do not need anything else from us. If you are stacking permissions across the CBK and CMA split, or the liquid-capital question above decides whether your plan works, the 48-hour gap check exists for that.