Stablecoin licensing compared: Kenya gives issuance its own licence, Brazil does not
Two regimes, two completely different starting questions
If you issue a fiat-referenced token and you are looking at Kenya and Brazil, the first thing to understand is that the two regimes do not even ask the same opening question. Kenya asks what you are. Brazil asks what you do.
Kenya’s Virtual Asset Service Providers Regulations, 2026 (Legal Notice No. 134 of 2026, published 22 July 2026) create ten activity categories, and stablecoin issuance is one of them in its own right. Supervision sits with the Central Bank of Kenya under the “Responsible Relevant Regulatory Authority” column of the First Schedule to the Virtual Asset Service Providers Act, 2025.
Brazil has no stablecoin issuer category. Article 4 of Resolução BCB nº 520 provides three: intermediário, custodiante and corretora — intermediary, custodian, and the combined broker that does both. Category is determined by function, not by how a business describes itself. An issuer that also matches orders and holds client keys is a corretora, whatever it calls itself in its own marketing.
Kenya: the biggest number in the schedule
The Fifth Schedule to Legal Notice 134, headed “Capital and Liquidity Requirements” and referenced by regulations 6(2)(h), 85(2)(a), 85(3) and 85(12), sets two columns only — paid-up capital and liquid capital. For stablecoin issuance the instrument text is:
- Paid-up capital: KSh 300,000,000
- Liquid capital: KSh 60,000,000, or 100% of current liabilities for at least 30 days, whichever is higher
That is the highest paid-up figure of the ten categories — twice the KSh 150,000,000 required of a wallet provider and three times the KSh 100,000,000 required of an exchange. The liquid capital limb is the one worth modelling: for issuance and for wallet provision, Kenya uses a liabilities-coverage test rather than the 8%-of-total-liabilities formula it applies to trading-side categories, so your liquid requirement moves with the size of your redemption book.
On fees, the First Schedule sets a KSh 100,000 application fee and a KSh 2,000,000 licence fee for stablecoin issuance — again the highest licence fee in the schedule — with renewal at KSh 2,000,000 or 0.15% of gross turnover, whichever is higher.
Two provisions modify all of this and are routinely missed. Regulation 85(6) provides that a licensee undertaking more than one permissible activity holds the paid-up capital of the highest-capital category plus 50% of the paid-up capital for each additional activity. It is neither the sum nor the highest alone. An issuer that also provides wallets holds KSh 300,000,000 plus half of KSh 150,000,000, so KSh 375,000,000. And regulation 85(7) allows the authority to raise the requirement by reference to risk profile, which makes the schedule a floor rather than a ceiling.
One correction worth carrying: the National Treasury’s March 2026 draft put stablecoin issuance at KSh 500,000,000. The gazetted figure is KSh 300,000,000. Seven of the ten capital categories fell between the draft and the gazette, several of them steeply. If a stablecoin plan for Kenya was shelved on the draft numbers, it was shelved on figures that are no longer the law.
Brazil: capital is a calculation, not a price list
Brazil publishes no per-category capital figure for a stablecoin business, because there is no stablecoin category. The requirement is computed. The arithmetic sits in the annexes to Resolução Conjunta 14/2025 read with Resolução BCB nº 517/2025, and combines a cost parcel driven by the number of registered operational categories, with an uplift for in-house technology infrastructure subject to a ceiling, and an activity parcel driven by services performed, the nature of the funds and applicable multipliers. Outcomes reported in the market fall roughly in the range of R$10.8 million to R$37.2 million, but the annexes govern and worked examples published by law firms differ because their assumptions differ. Do not treat any single published figure as your number.
Whatever the figure, capital must be subscribed and paid up in cash, with integralisation immediately following subscription. A commitment letter or a parent company guarantee is not capital, and capital is a Phase 1 gate under article 9 of Instrução Normativa BCB nº 704 — the filing due 30 October 2026 for providers already operating when the framework entered into force on 2 February 2026.
The dimension Brazil adds that Kenya does not
Fiat-referenced tokens in Brazil are not only a licensing question; they are a foreign exchange question. The BCB’s own November 2025 presentation of the package describes cross-border requirements for virtual asset service providers, including identifying counterparties in self-custody wallets and detailed reporting, and aligns external sector statistics with international recommendations where virtual assets are involved. During 2026 there has been further reported activity tightening how virtual assets referenced to fiat currency may be used in the electronic foreign exchange rules. We are not quoting a rate, an article number or a date for that second point, because we have not read the current text directly — if cross-border stablecoin flows are central to your model, confirm the position in the BCB normative database before you build on it.
The checklist behind this article
Our readiness checklists work item by item through what each regime actually requires of an application file, with every item cited to a rule, regulation or article number, every figure marked as instrument text or as reporting of it, and open questions left marked as open: Kenya, USD 79, Brazil, USD 79, and for the UK regime USD 149. Updated editions are free as the position develops.
If you are issuing in one market and know which category you fall into, the checklist for that market is the whole of what you need. If you issue in one jurisdiction and distribute in another, or you cannot tell which Brazilian category your architecture puts you in, the 48-hour gap check is built for exactly that question.