Ghana Builds a Committee Before It Builds a Crypto Licence

GHANA · MARKETS

Ghana virtual assets regulation now has a five-agency coordinating committee, inaugurated in Accra on 25 August, roughly a year and a half before the licensing law it is meant to coordinate is due to take full effect.

What the Ghana virtual assets committee is for

The Bank of Ghana and the Securities and Exchange Commission launched the Virtual Assets Coordinating Committee, known as the VACC, at an event in Accra on Tuesday 25 August. Some coverage renders the name as the Virtual Asset Coordination Committee; the wording used by the Ghana News Agency and Citi Newsroom is the version above.

Five institutions sit on it. Alongside the two regulators are the Ministry of Finance, the Cyber Security Authority and the Financial Intelligence Centre, which tracks dirty money.

Virtual asset service providers, or VASPs, are the companies that let people buy, sell, store or move digital assets such as cryptocurrencies. The committee’s stated mandate is to keep implementation of the new law consistent across agencies, to share information, and to coordinate the response to risks like money laundering, terrorist financing, cyberattacks, consumer harm and financial instability.

Seven officials were named to the committee, two each from the central bank and the SEC, and one each from the finance ministry, the Cyber Security Authority and the Financial Intelligence Centre. The Act itself provides for this committee, so it is a legal body, not an ad-hoc talking shop.

Ghana wrote the law first, and is still writing the rules

Parliament passed the Virtual Asset Service Providers Bill on 19 December 2025, and President John Mahama signed it into law as Act 1154 on 30 December. That ended a long period in which the Bank of Ghana discouraged crypto activity without offering any route to authorisation.

Governor Dr Johnson Pandit Asiama says the operational guidelines are being written by the two designated regulators, alongside policy sandboxes at both institutions, with the goal of fully operationalising the Act by 2027. A regulatory sandbox lets a small number of firms test real products under close supervision before the full rules apply.

The SEC published its sandbox guidelines on 23 January 2026, covering seven categories of service, and admitted six firms to a one-year sandbox in February. The central bank has also set up a dedicated Virtual Assets Department to handle supervision.

That sequence is worth noticing. The statute exists, the sandbox exists, the committee now exists, and the licensing regime the whole structure is built around does not. No target month within 2027 has been given, and no penalty attaches to the date.

Why the dual-regulator design makes coordination more than ceremony

Ghana split supervision between two bodies. The central bank handles payments and licensing; the SEC handles tokens that behave like securities.

That is an unusual arrangement, and it creates the obvious risk that a product sits in the gap between two mandates. A standing committee is a reasonable answer to that, provided it meets and provided it decides things.

The regulators have already shown they will move without waiting for the full framework. On 20 February 2026 the two institutions jointly ordered virtual asset firms to take down public advertising, including large billboards in Accra, within 48 hours.

Read the sourcing carefully

Almost everything known about the launch comes from the regulators themselves, relayed through the state news agency and local business media. There is no industry response, no critic and no independent assessment in any of the accounts.

The market-size figures circulating alongside the story are third-hand. Reported Ghanaian cryptocurrency transaction volumes above US$10 billion by November 2025 come from secondary summaries, and transaction volume is not the same as holdings, ownership or market size.

How many virtual asset firms operate in Ghana, how many Ghanaians hold digital assets, and what the sector is worth in cedi terms are all unanswered. So is the committee’s budget, staffing and meeting schedule.

Why an outside investor should care

Ghana is trying to attract fintech capital while still repairing its reputation after the 2022 default. Both objectives argue for rules that are clear and, more importantly, enforced the same way twice.

The country also sits under continuous scrutiny from anti-money-laundering assessors, which is the less glamorous reason this law exists at all. A visible inter-agency structure is partly a message to those assessors.

For anyone weighing a licence application, the practical question is not the committee. It is whether the operational guidelines land in time for 2027, and what they demand.

This is regulatory reporting, not investment advice, and the rules described here are still being written. Anyone acting on them should read the Act and the guidelines when they are published.

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