In one corner of Kibera’s Soweto West neighbourhood, a trader accepts payment for sukuma wiki through a Lightning Network wallet on her phone. The transaction settles in under a second. It costs almost nothing. No bank account is required. Around 200 residents in this part of Nairobi’s largest informal settlement now use Bitcoin in some form for everyday purchases, from vegetables to water to boda boda rides.
In a government office across the city, the National Treasury is finalising regulations that will require any business touching customer crypto to obtain a licence, appoint a compliance officer, maintain capital reserves, and submit to annual audits.
These two realities are about to meet. Adopting Bitcoin Nairobi 2026, scheduled for June 24 to 25 at the ASK Dome in Jamhuri Park, will be the first time the globally recognised Bitcoin conference series holds a large-scale event in East Africa. A community field visit to Kibera on June 26 will round out the programme. The conference is organised by Gorilla Sats, Afribit Kibera, and Trezor Academy, with production by TALO Africa, CIO Africa, and DX5. Capital FM has signed on as official media partner.
The timing is deliberate. Kenya is mid-way through building one of Africa’s most detailed regulatory frameworks for digital assets. The people most affected by those rules are already transacting with Bitcoin in places the banking system has largely ignored.
Kibera’s quiet experiment
The grassroots Bitcoin economy in Kibera is small but functional. It is run by Afribit Africa, a Nairobi-based organisation that has been working in the settlement since 2022. According to figures consistent across multiple independent sources, the project has onboarded over 150 merchants, trained more than 120 young people and women, and recorded over 2,000 Bitcoin transactions.
Residents use Lightning wallets such as Blink and Tando to make payments by scanning QR codes. Garbage collectors earn satoshis (the smallest unit of Bitcoin) through a waste recycling programme called Taka Sats. Young mothers in the Afribit Women and Girls Empowerment Group upcycle old sacks and jeans into bags and carpets, selling them within the community for Bitcoin. Local football teams settle expenses in sats.
The amounts involved are tiny. But the model works. And it matters because the people using Bitcoin in Kibera are not speculating on price movements. They are using it as a payment tool because it is cheaper than M-Pesa transaction fees, does not require a bank account or formal identification, and cannot be reversed or frozen by a third party. For a population that is largely unbanked, those features are not ideological talking points. They are practical advantages.
“We prefer Bitcoin because it is permissionless. Anyone can download a wallet and be their own bank,” Afribit founder Roney Mdawida told Capital FM earlier this month.
Where regulation stands
While Kibera’s Bitcoin economy has grown organically, the government has been building a formal regulatory structure from the top down.
Kenya’s Virtual Asset Service Providers Act was signed into law in November 2025. The Act creates a licensing framework overseen jointly by the Central Bank of Kenya and the Capital Markets Authority. It targets commercial intermediaries: exchanges, custodial wallet providers, brokers, and token issuers. Peer-to-peer transactions and personal self-custody fall outside the licensing perimeter. If you hold your own keys and transact directly with another person, you are not captured by the law. But the moment you offer custody, brokerage, or platform services to the public, you need a licence.
In March 2026, the National Treasury published draft regulations to operationalise the Act. These cover capital reserves, anti-money laundering compliance, cybersecurity standards, consumer complaints handling, advertising rules, and mandatory reporting of incidents like data breaches. A legal analysis by Bowmans notes that once finalised, a comprehensive licensing regime for virtual assets in Kenya should follow. Public comment closed on 10 April 2026. The multi-agency task force behind the rules is now expected to amend and finalise them.
This is not happening in a vacuum. Kenya was placed on the Financial Action Task Force greylist partly due to vulnerabilities in its virtual asset sector. The VASP Act was a direct response to that pressure. We covered the early stages of this regulatory journey when the National Treasury first unveiled its draft policy and bill in January 2025.
By the time Adopting Bitcoin opens in late June, Kenya could be weeks away from a live licensing regime.
The tension the conference must address
The question hanging over the event is straightforward. Does the new regulatory framework recognise and protect grassroots Bitcoin use like what is happening in Kibera, or does it inadvertently squeeze out the communities that have adopted it most actively?
The VASP Act was designed to bring order to a market where unlicensed exchanges exposed users to scams and fraud. That is a legitimate concern. CMA Manager Jairas Muaka noted at a recent stakeholder forum that young people have been disproportionately affected by fraudulent schemes in the crypto space.
But the communities using Bitcoin most actively in Kenya are not large exchanges or token issuers. They are vegetable traders, waste recyclers, and boda boda riders who have adopted a parallel financial system because the conventional one never reached them. The compliance costs baked into the draft regulations, such as capital thresholds, governance assessments, and cybersecurity requirements, are designed for companies, not community projects operating on a few thousand dollars.
Adopting Bitcoin has previously held editions in El Salvador, Arnhem (Netherlands), and Cape Town. The Nairobi event marks its first large-scale summit in East Africa. The two-day programme at the ASK Dome will cover financial literacy, digital sovereignty, inflation hedging, decentralised financial systems, and use cases around payments, remittances, and small business financing.
But the June 26 Kibera field visit may be the most important day on the calendar. It is one thing to discuss Bitcoin adoption in a conference hall. It is another to walk through Soweto West and watch a resident pay for a jerrycan of water with a QR code that settles instantly and for free.
For any regulators in attendance, the visit would be a reality check. And for the builders and community organisers who have spent three years constructing this economy from scratch, it is an opportunity to show that Bitcoin adoption in Kenya is not a theoretical exercise. It is already happening.
What to watch
The draft regulations are still being finalised. The conference could become an informal feedback channel between regulators and the communities they are about to govern. A few things are worth tracking as June approaches.
Whether the final rules include any simplified compliance pathway for community-level projects or small-value transactions. Whether the CBK and CMA signal a timeline for when licensing formally begins. And whether grassroots Bitcoin projects like Afribit can continue to operate once enforcement starts, or whether they will be caught in rules built for a different scale of player entirely.
Kenya is not short of ambition on digital finance. What it needs now is a real conversation between the people writing the rules and the people already living under them. Adopting Bitcoin Nairobi is, at minimum, the right venue for that to happen.
