BlockCoop SACCO has launched Kenya’s first blockchain-powered savings and credit cooperative, introducing a model that converts traditional SACCO shares into tradable digital assets through its BLOCKS token. Since beginning share trading on 1 October 2025, the cooperative has achieved an estimated market capitalisation of KES 1.3 billion and attracted a rapidly expanding base of members and investors. The initiative replaces conventional guarantor requirements with trust-based scoring and guarantor pools, and has rolled out the “Lipa na BLOCKS” loyalty programme that allows participants to earn discounts on mobile and Till number payments. Strategic partnerships with Nomachain and HF are designed to scale tokenisation of SACCO assets and deliver compliant infrastructure across the broader cooperative sector. The launch arrives at a moment of convergence in Kenya: parliament is debating comprehensive SACCO reforms through the Sacco Societies (Amendment) Bill 2025, the country’s new Virtual Asset Service Providers Act is being operationalised, and regulated SACCOs now manage assets exceeding KES 1.21 trillion.
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Key Overview
- First of its kind: BlockCoop is Kenya’s first blockchain-powered SACCO, introducing tradable digital share tokens to the cooperative sector.
- Digital token: BLOCKS, a digital share token enabling peer-to-peer trading and secondary market liquidity for SACCO members.
- Market cap: Estimated at KES 1.3 billion since share trading launched on 1 October 2025.
- Token holders: Over 1,300 holders and growing.
- Loyalty programme: “Lipa na BLOCKS” — discounts when spending via Till numbers, Paybill, or mobile transactions.
- Partnerships: Nomachain (tokenisation of SACCO assets) and HF (compliant SACCO infrastructure).
- Sector backdrop: Kenya’s regulated SACCOs hold KES 1.21 trillion in assets and serve over 7.4 million members.
- Regulatory timing: The Virtual Asset Service Providers Act 2025 came into effect on 4 November 2025, providing a legal framework for tokenised assets.
A Historic Milestone for Cooperative Finance
BlockCoop SACCO has launched what it describes as Kenya’s first blockchain-powered savings and credit cooperative society, an initiative that blends decentralised finance infrastructure with the century-old cooperative model that underpins much of the country’s financial inclusion architecture. The launch, announced on 27 April 2026, marks a historic milestone in the evolution of cooperative finance and positions Kenya at the leading edge of blockchain adoption among Africa’s cooperative movements.
Speaking during the launch event, Director Gideon Gitonga emphasised that the innovation is designed to address structural challenges that have long constrained the SACCO sector. He noted that the focus is on leveraging technology to expand access and trust, arguing that blockchain enables a more transparent, inclusive, and efficient cooperative model.
The initiative was reported by Bizna Kenya and has been closely tracked by industry observers who see it as a signal of how digital assets may reshape the way millions of Kenyans save, borrow and build wealth.
How BLOCKS Transforms Traditional SACCO Shares
At the heart of BlockCoop’s model is a digital share token called BLOCKS. In a traditional SACCO, member shares are essentially locked capital — they cannot be freely traded, transferred to third parties, or used as liquid assets. This illiquidity has long been one of the sector’s most persistent pain points, deterring younger and more mobile members from committing capital to cooperatives.
BlockCoop has transformed these shares into tradable digital assets on its peer-to-peer platform, enabling members and investors to buy, sell, or trade SACCO shares in real time. The token is built on the Binance Smart Chain (BSC) and is structured with investment packages that include vesting schedules and secondary market integration. Members can purchase BLOCKS using M-Pesa or crypto, stake tokens for dividends, and trade on the SACCO’s order-book platform.
Since launching share trading on 1 October 2025, the cooperative has reported significant traction, reaching an estimated market capitalisation of KES 1.3 billion and attracting over 1,300 token holders. That growth trajectory, while still modest compared to Kenya’s largest SACCOs, reflects a rising appetite for digitised cooperative finance among younger, tech-savvy Kenyans.
The model also introduces what BlockCoop calls DAO-based governance — decentralised autonomous organisation structures that allow members to participate more actively in decision-making, in contrast to the delegate-heavy governance systems that characterise most established SACCOs.
Rethinking Credit: Guarantor Pools and Trust Scoring
One of the most impactful innovations in BlockCoop’s architecture is the replacement of the traditional guarantor system. In Kenya’s conventional SACCO model, borrowers must secure personal guarantors — typically fellow members who pledge their own savings as collateral against the loan. This system, while effective in building mutual accountability, is widely seen as restrictive, exclusionary, and administratively burdensome.
BlockCoop replaces it with guarantor pools and a blockchain-powered trust-based scoring system. Instead of requiring individual guarantors, the platform uses on-chain data — including member history, savings behaviour, and staking activity — to generate a trust score that automates credit assessment. Smart contracts handle loan disbursement and repayment, reducing approval times and removing the interpersonal friction that often discourages borrowing.
This digital asset-backed lending approach is designed to be more inclusive, allowing members without extensive social networks within the SACCO — including diaspora Kenyans and younger members — to access credit based on their financial behaviour rather than their personal connections.
Lipa na BLOCKS: Turning Spending Into Saving
Building on the early momentum of its share trading platform, BlockCoop has launched the “Lipa na BLOCKS” loyalty campaign — an initiative designed to bridge the gap between blockchain-based cooperative finance and everyday spending in Kenya’s mobile-money-dominated economy.
Through the programme, participants acquire BLOCKS tokens from the secondary market and use them to enjoy discounts when making payments via Till numbers, Paybill, or mobile transactions. The programme is open to the public and accessible through the Lipa na BLOCKS platform, making it an entry point for individuals who may not yet be SACCO members.
The concept is significant because it attaches real-world transactional utility to what would otherwise be a purely financial instrument. As Gitonga has articulated on his LinkedIn profile, the vision is to turn spending into participation, users into stakeholders, and loyalty into ownership — a philosophy that resonates with Web3 principles of user-ownership but applied to the familiar context of Kenyan cooperative finance.
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Strategic Partnerships: Nomachain and HF
BlockCoop’s ecosystem is being bolstered by two strategic partnerships announced at the launch. The first is with Nomachain, a Nairobi-based blockchain firm specialising in real estate tokenisation. The second is with HF, which will provide compliant SACCO infrastructure to ensure that cooperative systems built on the platform meet regulatory standards.
Nomachain has established itself as a pioneering force in Kenyan blockchain. The platform, which is deployed on both BSC and Lisk blockchains, has already tokenised more than $1 million in real estate and over 68 rent-to-own plans worth more than $1.8 million. Its integration with BlockCoop SACCO is designed to power the tokenisation of SACCO-held assets — including land and buildings — that are typically illiquid and difficult to value or trade.
This is a particularly meaningful development in the Kenyan context, where many SACCOs hold significant real estate portfolios but struggle to monetise them or use them as the basis for member financing. By creating digital representations of these assets on the blockchain, the partnership aims to unlock new pathways for investment and financial inclusion.
HF’s role is complementary: it will provide the compliant infrastructure layer that ensures BlockCoop and other SACCOs operating on its model meet the regulatory requirements set by the Sacco Societies Regulatory Authority (SASRA), which supervises 355 regulated SACCOs accounting for 85% of the sector’s total assets.
A KES 1.21 Trillion Sector Under Transformation
BlockCoop’s launch arrives at a moment of intense transformation for Kenya’s cooperative finance sector. According to the latest SASRA quarterly report covering October to December 2025, total assets of regulated SACCOs grew to KES 1.21 trillion, up from KES 1.08 trillion in December 2024, representing 11.91% annual growth. Gross loans expanded to KES 948 billion, deposits rose to KES 832 billion, and total industry income reached KES 172 billion.
The sector serves more than 7.4 million members across approximately 355 regulated entities, making it one of the largest cooperative financial ecosystems in Africa. Yet despite this scale, the sector continues to face structural challenges: illiquid shares, opaque governance, manual processes, high loan default rates in some institutions, and the lingering fallout from the KUSCCO liquidity crisis that exposed KES 14.6 billion in tied-up SACCO funds.
The SACCO Societies (Amendment) Bill 2025, currently before Parliament, is designed to address many of these vulnerabilities. Sponsored by Majority Leader Kimani Ichung’wah, the bill proposes the creation of a Deposit Guarantee Fund to protect member savings in the event of SACCO collapse, a Central Liquidity Facility to provide short-term financing during liquidity shocks, and stricter governance and reporting requirements. The bill also proposes allowing groups of 30 or more deposit-taking SACCOs to form secondary cooperative societies that would function as centralised financial hubs — pooling liquidity, offering inter-SACCO lending, and running shared payment platforms.
These legislative reforms, while distinct from BlockCoop’s blockchain-native approach, are converging toward the same set of objectives: greater transparency, improved liquidity, stronger member protection, and the modernisation of a cooperative sector that has not kept pace with Kenya’s broader fintech revolution.
Regulatory Tailwinds: The VASP Act 2025
BlockCoop’s model also benefits from a favourable shift in Kenya’s regulatory landscape for digital assets. The Virtual Asset Service Providers Act 2025, passed by Parliament on 7 October 2025 and signed into law by President William Ruto, came into effect on 4 November 2025. It establishes a comprehensive licensing and regulatory framework for entities dealing in virtual assets, including crypto exchanges, wallet providers, custodians, brokers, and tokenised asset issuers.
Regulatory oversight is shared between the Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) and the Capital Markets Authority (CMA), replacing an earlier proposal for a standalone Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority. Operators must maintain a physical office in Kenya, segregate client funds, comply with anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing requirements, and undergo independent IT audits.
By April 2026, the National Treasury had completed public consultations on the draft implementing regulations, bringing the country closer to finalising the detailed licensing requirements that will govern the sector. The CMA has confirmed that no virtual asset service providers have yet been formally licensed under the new framework, with the regulator still developing the necessary rules and approval processes.
For BlockCoop, this evolving regulatory environment presents both opportunity and risk. On one hand, the VASP Act provides the legal certainty that has been lacking in Kenya’s blockchain space. On the other, the SACCO — as a cooperative regulated by SASRA — may find itself navigating dual regulatory obligations as its token-based model straddles the line between cooperative finance and virtual asset services.
Kenya’s Blockchain Moment
BlockCoop’s emergence is part of a broader blockchain ecosystem that has been gathering pace across Kenya. The country ranked among the top nations globally in the 2025 Global Crypto Adoption Index, driven by high mobile-money penetration, a young and tech-literate population, and practical use cases in remittances, cross-border trade and alternative savings. Sub-Saharan Africa as a whole received more than $205 billion in on-chain value between July 2024 and June 2025, a 52% year-over-year increase.
Kenya’s blockchain ecosystem now extends well beyond cryptocurrency trading. Nomachain’s rent-to-own tokenisation model is opening fractional ownership of residential property to small investors and diaspora Kenyans. The intersection of blockchain technology with cooperatives — a sector that manages over KES 1 trillion in assets and serves millions — represents one of the most potentially transformative applications of decentralised finance in any emerging market.
BlockCoop’s model, in particular, offers a compelling thesis: that the institutional trust and community orientation of the SACCO model can be enhanced rather than replaced by blockchain infrastructure. By making shares liquid, governance participatory, credit access automated, and real-world spending integrated, the platform is attempting to build a cooperative that functions with the speed and transparency of a DeFi protocol but retains the social cohesion and regulatory grounding of a licensed Kenyan SACCO.
What Comes Next
Whether BlockCoop SACCO can sustain its early momentum will depend on several factors: the pace at which Kenya’s VASP regulations are finalised and applied to tokenised cooperative assets, the depth of adoption among everyday Kenyan savers rather than early crypto adopters, and the capacity of its infrastructure partners to scale tokenisation of illiquid SACCO assets in a compliant and trustworthy manner.
The broader cooperative sector is watching closely. With over 13,000 registered SACCOs in Kenya — most of them unregulated and many struggling with governance and transparency — the potential market for blockchain-powered cooperative infrastructure is vast. If BlockCoop’s model proves viable, it could serve as a template not only for Kenyan SACCOs but for cooperative movements across East Africa and beyond, in markets where trust deficits, illiquid assets, and limited digital infrastructure have long constrained financial inclusion.
As the cooperative sector continues to evolve and Kenya’s digital asset regulatory framework takes shape, BlockCoop SACCO stands at an unusual intersection — part cooperative tradition, part fintech disruption — that may well define the next chapter of how millions of Africans save, borrow, and invest.
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