Kenya's 4 November deadline has no transitional provision
Most licensing deadlines come with a cushion: a transitional provision, a savings clause, a deemed-licensed status for firms already trading, or at least a rule that a filed application protects you while it is being decided. Kenya's does not. That single absence should shape how a firm plans the rest of 2026.
What the deadline actually is
Section 47 of the Virtual Asset Service Providers Act, 2025 (Act No. 20 of 2025) sets the date: 4 November 2026. The implementing rules are the Virtual Asset Service Providers Regulations, published as Legal Notice No. 134, made on 3 July 2026 by John Mbadi Ngongo, Cabinet Secretary to the National Treasury, and gazetted on 22 July 2026 in Kenya Gazette Supplement No. 185 (Special Issue 4253), Legislative Supplement No. 103. The instrument runs to 116 pages, 151 regulations and six schedules.
Cite both supplement numbers when you reference it. Kenyan supplements carry a Gazette Supplement number and a Legislative Supplement number, and different sources quote one or the other, which makes a single instrument look like two. One practical note on retrieval: the Kenya Law record for Legal Notice 134 is a PDF-only record with no HTML body, which is a large part of why the market quotes commentary about the regulations rather than the regulations themselves.
The thing that is not in it
Across all 151 regulations there is no transitional provision, no savings clause and no deemed-licensing rule. Nothing says that a firm trading in Kenya today keeps trading while its application is considered. Nothing grandfathers an existing book.
Set against the two other regimes we track, the gap is stark. In the United Kingdom, regulations 53 and 56 of SI 2026/102 create a saving for firms that apply within the FCA's application period and, beyond that, an exemption for activity necessary to perform pre-existing contracts. In Brazil, Instrucao Normativa BCB no 704 gives providers that were operating on 2 February 2026 a two-phase route, and spells out the consequence of not filing by 30 October 2026: cease within 30 days, notify clients and transfer their assets to other authorised institutions. Kenya sets out the deadline and the licence, and stops.
What is genuinely still open
- The application window has not opened as at the date of this article. The regulations are gazetted; the route in is not yet running.
- Whether a firm that has filed, and whose application has not been determined by 4 November 2026, may continue to operate. The instrument does not address it.
- The application form itself.
- How the regulation 85(7) power to raise capital requirements by risk profile will be applied.
- What level of insurance cover counts as commensurate with risk and scale under regulation 88(1). Regulation 88 contains exactly one hard figure, the KSh 1,000,000 minimum professional indemnity for investment advisers at reg. 88(6).
We flag these as open rather than answering them. If you read a confident answer to any of them, ask which provision it comes from.
The planning consequence
If there is no cushion, the file has to be complete on the day the window opens rather than started then. The longest lead times sit on the items that cannot be bought quickly:
- The nine operational policies under regulation 6(2)(f): risk management; AML, CFT and CPF; data protection and privacy; cybersecurity and information technology; complaints management; market conduct; consumer protection; conflict of interest; and business continuity and disaster recovery. The regulation says "including", so the list is not exhaustive, and the Second Schedule application form separately asks for a written outsourcing policy. Any four-item list you find online is the March 2026 draft, not the law.
- The named risk register required by the Third Schedule business-plan content. It is an application deliverable, not an annex to be promised later, and reviewers read the register before the prose.
- A chief information security officer, required in the gazetted text and absent from the March draft.
- Paid-up capital actually in place under the Fifth Schedule, and for multi-activity firms under regulation 85(6), which is the highest category plus fifty per cent of the paid-up capital for each additional activity.
One thing to re-check before you re-plan
If your Kenya decision was taken on figures from the National Treasury's March 2026 draft, take it again. Seven of the ten capital categories fell between draft and gazette, several by 80 to 95 per cent. The investment adviser requirement went from KSh 2.5m to nil; tokenisation from KSh 200m to KSh 10m; ICO and token issuance platform from KSh 200m to KSh 20m; virtual asset payment processor from KSh 50m to KSh 10m; broker from KSh 30m to KSh 10m; exchange from KSh 150m to KSh 100m; stablecoin issuance from KSh 500m to KSh 300m. The draft is still downloadable from treasury.go.ke and is still being quoted as though it were the law. A firm that shelved its Kenya plan on the March numbers was right about the draft and wrong about the regulations.
Fees, for scale
First Schedule application and licence fees, as gazetted: exchange KSh 100,000 and KSh 1,000,000; wallet provider KSh 100,000 and KSh 500,000; virtual asset payment processor KSh 100,000 and KSh 200,000; broker KSh 100,000 and KSh 100,000; investment adviser KSh 10,000 and KSh 50,000; virtual asset manager KSh 50,000 and KSh 200,000; stablecoin issuance KSh 100,000 and KSh 2,000,000. Those are instrument text. They are also the smallest number in the whole project, which is the point: the cost of a Kenyan licence is the preparation, not the fee, and with no transitional provision the preparation has to be finished before the window opens rather than after.
The checklist behind this article
The Kenya VASP readiness checklist walks the application file item by item, each one cited to a regulation, schedule or section, every figure marked as gazette text or as reporting of it, and the questions that Legal Notice 134 leaves open marked as open. USD 79, with updated editions free as the position develops.
If you are applying for a single category under one regulator, the checklist is the whole job and you will not need anything further from us. If you sit across the CBK and CMA split, or you are trying to work out whether an existing Kenyan book can keep running, the 48-hour gap check at this link looks at your specific position.