Two Laws: What UK, Kenya Reveal About Crypto’s Future

For years, crypto has lived in a strange space: treated like money on screens, code in courtrooms and a risk factor in central bank speeches. Two new moves, one in London and one in Nairobi, pull that world a little closer to the legal mainstream without quite taming it.

In the United Kingdom, Parliament recently passed the Property (Digital Assets etc.) Act 2025, a law that gives bitcoin and other crypto-tokens a formal home in property law. Under the old categories, English law recognised physical things you can hold and rights you can enforce through contracts. Digital assets never fit neatly into either. Judges managed on a case-by-case basis, declaring that crypto could be treated as property, but each ruling rested on legal gymnastics.

The new statute removes the guesswork. It recognises that certain digital assets can form a distinct category of personal property. For owners, that brings a degree of comfort. If coins are stolen from a UK-based custodian, or end up in the middle of a divorce, a bankruptcy or a fraud case, courts now have a clear path to treat those tokens as property, issue proprietary orders and pursue remedies that look closer to those used for more traditional assets.

Protection, though, comes with a price. A better handle for judges and lawyers is also a stronger grip for the state. Once digital assets sit squarely inside property law, freezing orders become more straightforward. Exchanges, brokers and custodial wallets based in the UK can be compelled to co-operate with investigations and asset recovery. On-chain, nothing changes. Keys still sign transactions. Miners still confirm blocks. Off-chain, the relationship between crypto and the legal system becomes tighter and more structured.

Kenya has arrived at a similar point from a different direction. A decade ago, the Central Bank warned that virtual currencies were unregulated and not legal tender, and that banks should steer clear. The message was cautious and defensive. On the ground, adoption grew anyway. Kenyans turned to global exchanges and peer-to-peer platforms, helped by the country’s familiarity with digital value through mobile money.

By 2019, when the government’s Blockchain and AI Taskforce released its report, the tone had shifted. The report urged the state to explore distributed ledgers for land records, identity systems and public services. It hinted at a future in which digital assets, including tokens, could sit inside a broader national strategy rather than only at the fringes.

The Virtual Asset Service Providers Act, passed in 2025, turns that gradual drift into a clear line. The law creates Kenya’s first licensing and compliance framework for exchanges, custodial wallets and token platforms. Anyone running a serious crypto business is now expected to be registered, to have a physical presence in the country, to meet capital and governance standards and to comply with anti-money-laundering and counter-terrorism rules that mirror global norms.

The Central Bank of Kenya keeps its position on money itself. Crypto remains outside the status of legal tender; the shilling still anchors the system. What changes is the treatment of the industry that has grown around bitcoin and other assets. A licensed exchange in Nairobi can, on paper, operate with more confidence, work with banks and payment providers and pitch Kenya as a regional hub for digital-asset activity. At the same time, it must know its customers, monitor transactions and live with audits and enforcement actions if it falls short.

Both moves land squarely in the space Satoshi Nakamoto tried to route around. In the 2008 bitcoin whitepaper, Satoshi described a peer-to-peer electronic cash system that would cut out “trusted third parties” such as banks and payment processors. Double-spending would be prevented not by account managers and chargebacks, but by proof-of-work and a public ledger. Finality would rest on computation and consensus rather than on a back office deciding to honour or reverse a transfer.

The UK and Kenyan laws do not reach into that protocol layer. Self-custodied bitcoin sent from one person to another still travels across the network in the way Satoshi set out. What they reshape is the perimeter: the points where crypto touches courts, regulators, banks and investors.

In the UK, the key question is: what exactly is this thing that people hold and trade? The answer now has force in statute. It is property, with rights and obligations that flow from that label. In Kenya, the focus is: who is allowed to run the on-ramps and off-ramps, and under what conditions? The answer is that virtual asset service providers now sit closer to banks and securities firms in regulatory terms, with the obligations that follow.

For exchanges and large platforms, the message is mixed. Legal certainty can make it easier to raise capital, design products and attract institutional clients. It can also push up costs and increase exposure to enforcement. Small or lightly capitalised players may find it harder to survive in a world of licences, capital requirements and continuous monitoring.

For ordinary users, the picture is more personal. Someone in London who keeps coins with a regulated custodian may feel more comfortable knowing that courts can treat those assets like other forms of property if something goes wrong. Someone in Nairobi trading through a licensed exchange may feel less likely to wake up to a sudden shutdown or blanket banking ban. The trade-off is that both sit inside more visible, more traceable systems, where identity checks and reporting are no longer optional.

For the hardest-line believers in Satoshi’s original idea, this looks less like progress and more like absorption. From that viewpoint, the point of bitcoin was not only to build a new payment rail but to offer a form of money that sat outside the reach of territorial law. To call it property and to license its gateways is, in this reading, to drag it back into the structure it was meant to escape. Their likely response is to push further into self-custody, decentralised exchanges and tools that avoid custodians altogether, where local rules allow.

The reality is more complicated than a simple win or loss for any side. What is emerging is a layered settlement. On one layer, code still clears transactions without care for borders or court systems. On another, judges, regulators and policymakers are building doctrines that let them interact with that code, exert pressure through intermediaries and offer remedies when things go wrong.

For the crypto community, the question is less whether this trend can be stopped and more how to live with it. Some will choose the fully sovereign route, holding their own keys and staying away from regulated venues. Others will accept a measure of scrutiny in exchange for convenience, consumer protection and access to the formal financial system. In countries like Kenya, where digital finance and youth adoption intersect with a keen interest in new forms of investment, that balance will shape whether bitcoin ends up remembered mainly as an investment product, an infrastructure layer or still as a kind of electronic cash.

Satoshi’s shadow hangs over all of this. The protocol has held. The politics around it are still moving.