Kenya Digital Exchange (KDX) will enhance the country‘s financial market infrastructure by offering a secure and fully regulated way to tokenise real-world assets.
Being a leading nation in cryptocurrency adoption across Africa, Kenya is now also embracing the tokenisation of real-world assets, which is gaining traction through popular tokenised money market funds. The country is launching its own Kenya Digital Exchange, co-created by DeFi Technologies, SovFi, Valour Inc. and the Nairobi Securities Exchange.
The new platform focuses on digitising real-world assets (RWAs) such as government bonds, agricultural commodities, and carbon credits. It will facilitate their primary issuance, trading, and liquidity provisioning. This initiative seeks to enhance financial inclusion and provide Kenyan investors with access to a broader range of asset classes through blockchain technology.
The KDX platform will operate under a phased rollout strategy and will feature a diverse revenue model, including trading fees, listing fees, and staking services. This approach aims to enhance investor access, improve market liquidity, and diversify revenue streams.
The service launch will be divided into three main phases, expected to fully conclude by Q2 2026. The initial phase, planned to start by the end of Q3 2025, will concentrate on onboarding investors, ensuring regulatory compliance, and initiating the issuance of tokenised RWAs. Subsequent phases will introduce secondary market trading, advanced AI-driven trading strategies, market-making functionalities, and interoperability with global digital exchanges.
As for the technical part, KDX will leverage blockchain technology, including integration with Hedera, to facilitate secure, transparent, and efficient transactions. Hedera Hashgraph is a distributed ledger technology that offers a fast, secure, and energy-efficient alternative to traditional blockchains. Unlike multiple other blockchains that organise data into sequential blocks, Hedera uses a unique “hashgraph” structure, allowing for high-speed transactions and low latency.
This design enables the network to process over 10,000 transactions per second, making it suitable for applications requiring rapid and reliable data processing, such as the ones the Kenya Digital Exchange will provide. Hedera’s architecture supports the tokenisation of real-world assets, while its governance model, involving a council of global organisations, ensures stability and trustworthiness, which is crucial for financial platforms like KDX.
Olivier Roussy Newton of DeFi Technologies said that this partnership is a major move toward growing Africa’s digital asset infrastructure. By working with the Nairobi Securities Exchange, the goal is to give investors access to new types of assets, support economic development, and help make Kenya a top financial centre on the continent.
The country is already strong in digital assets acceptance, with 4.25 million Kenyans, or 8.5% of the population, owning crypto. That positions the country fifth globally in cryptocurrency ownership, ahead of developed nations like the United States. This crypto keenness is largely driven by the country’s youthful, tech-savvy population, with over 75% under the age of 35, who are eager to explore new financial opportunities.
At the same time, the average investment per user in Kenya remains relatively low (approximately $16.08). One of the reasons is absence of the regulatory framework for cryptocurrencies. Therefore, exploring tokenised RWAs might be more advantageous for many Kenians who want a combination of innovation with consumer protection and financial stability.
