Kenya's regulator wants eyes on every coin — and the receipts for at least 20 blockchains 📊

Kenya's Capital Markets Authority is seeking a blockchain analytics platform to monitor digital asset transactions, investigate suspicious activity and enforce compliance under the country's new virtual assets law, according to tender documents seen by Capital FM Africa. The system would track $BTC and $ETH along with at least 20 other blockchains in real time and retrospectively, generating automated alerts for high-risk wallets, large transfers, coin mixers, darknet-linked addresses and sanctioned entities, and screening transactions against United Nations and U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctions lists. It would also map relationships between wallets, reconstruct transaction timelines, trace funds across chains and assign risk scores tied to money laundering, ransomware, fraud and terrorism financing, with the regulator saying it wants to identify the exchanges most used by Kenyans and detect unlicensed offshore platforms serving the local market. The described capabilities mirror tools sold by blockchain intelligence firms including Chainalysis, TRM Labs and Elliptic, which market similar software to governments and regulators worldwide.

The purchase would support Kenya's Virtual Assets Service Providers Act, which President William Ruto signed in October and which took effect in November, giving the country its first comprehensive crypto framework. The law splits oversight between the Central Bank of Kenya, covering payments, stablecoins and custodial wallets, and the CMA, which regulates exchanges, brokers, investment advisers and tokenization platforms, part of a broader push to align with anti-money-laundering standards set by the Financial Action Task Force. No firms have been licensed yet; the National Treasury published draft regulations in March, and existing operators have until November 2026 to comply.

Kenya is one of Africa's largest crypto markets. Residents received about $19 billion in crypto between July 2024 and June 2025, ranking the country fourth on the continent, according to Chainalysis, and more than six million Kenyans are estimated to use digital assets, much of it through informal, peer-to-peer channels. Kenya joins a growing list of jurisdictions acquiring such tools: in the U.S., Immigration and Customs Enforcement moved last year to buy forensics software from both TRM Labs and Chainalysis, which already hold contracts with the FBI, the DEA and the IRS, while Britain's HMRC has brought on TRM Labs to trace suspect transactions.