Miami-based blockchain infrastructure company Global Settlement Holdings Inc. (GSH) announced on April 8 that it plans to acquire a majority stake in AKIBA International Limited, a Uganda-based investment and capital markets advisory firm. The two companies intend to build a regulated tokenised asset exchange that would allow institutional and retail investors to buy and sell on-chain representations of physical assets, including infrastructure projects, mineral value chains, and trade finance instruments. The deal remains non-binding, pending legal, financial, and regulatory due diligence, along with execution of definitive agreements.

Under the proposed structure, AKIBA would serve as the exclusive operating entity for both primary issuance and secondary trading on the platform. That exclusivity reflects a regulatory necessity: as a foreign entity, GSH cannot independently hold the Ugandan regulatory licences required to operate the exchange. The exchange is designed around three components: a broker-dealer off-ramp, a regulated marketplace for tokenised assets, and a mining platform. A licensed Ugandan bank, not yet publicly named, would handle settlement. Both parties say the platform will incorporate anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing controls as baseline requirements.

GSH CEO Ryan Kirkley framed Uganda's regulatory posture as unusually forward-looking. "Uganda's regulators are doing something we don't see often," he said, describing them as "actively building the framework for tokenised capital markets before market forces them to." AKIBA CEO Chris Kyerere described the goal as connecting local projects to international capital within a supervised framework. "Our shared objective is to build a regulated ecosystem that supports domestic development priorities, connecting local projects to global capital with appropriate oversight, governance, and banking integration," he said.

The asset categories the exchange would cover reflect Uganda's economic priorities. Infrastructure, including energy and digital systems, sits alongside special economic zones, responsible mining and mineral value chains, and trade finance products such as invoices and receivables. That last category has direct relevance for Uganda's large informal small business sector, where access to working capital financing through formal channels remains limited. Comparable models targeting receivables financing and on-chain credit have been cited in other sub-Saharan African markets, though the operational status of specific platforms in those corridors requires independent verification before those comparisons can be drawn with confidence.

The acquisition is the fourth major Africa-linked move by GSH in roughly six months. In October 2025, the company partnered with Uganda's Diacente Group on the Karamoja Green Industrial and Special Economic Zone project, targeting $5.5 billion in tokenised real-world asset commitments and piloting what would be Uganda's first tokenised shilling backed by treasury bonds. In December 2025, GSH partnered with Ubuntu Tribe on gold tokenisation across Africa and Europe. In March 2026, the company acquired credential and identity firms InvestReady and Accreditoken to build GSX Identity, a compliance layer covering FATF Travel Rule standards, MiCA (the EU's Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation), CBDC integration, and identity verification for regulated digital asset settlement. The AKIBA deal, if it closes, would add the exchange and off-ramp layer to what GSH is building as a vertically integrated stack inside Uganda.

The regional regulatory picture matters here. Uganda's Capital Markets Authority formally launched its regulatory sandbox rules in October 2025, and the Bank of Uganda has operated a fintech sandbox since 2021, opening it to digital asset firms in 2022. In November 2025, the Bank of Uganda governor outlined six pillars for an anticipated crypto framework covering licensing, client asset protection, AML and counter-terrorism financing, cybersecurity and operational resilience, market integrity, and data transparency. In articulating those pillars, the governor pointed to Kenya's Virtual Asset Service Providers Act as a cautionary example of the delays that can result when regulatory frameworks are developed reactively rather than proactively. A formal digital asset law does not yet exist in Uganda, which means the proposed exchange would initially operate inside sandbox frameworks rather than under permanent legislation. That creates execution risk: if the CMA and Bank of Uganda sandboxes are not coordinated, the platform could face jurisdictional ambiguity before it reaches full licensing.

The broader African crypto market provides some context for why this geography is attracting structured capital. Sub-Saharan Africa received approximately $205 billion in on-chain value between July 2024 and June 2025, a 52 percent increase year-on-year, according to data from Chainalysis cited by Ripple in April 2026. Some market aggregators have projected that Africa's tokenisation market could reach $100 billion by the end of 2026, though this figure has not been independently attributed to a single named primary source and should be treated as a widely cited estimate. Cross-border payment costs to the region have been cited at around 8 percent in industry sources, a figure broadly consistent with World Bank remittance corridor data, though the specific estimate originates from a press release issued by a GSH partner and should be read with that context in mind. Tokenised settlement infrastructure is designed to undercut those costs.

For East Africa specifically, the AKIBA deal positions Uganda as a potential competitor to Kenya in regulated exchange infrastructure. Kenya passed its Virtual Asset Service Providers Act in October 2025 but, as of April 2026, had not yet granted final approvals to a licensed exchange. If GSH and AKIBA reach operational status first, Kampala could attract institutional tokenised asset flows ahead of Nairobi. The next concrete milestones to watch are completion of due diligence, confirmation of the local banking settlement partner, and formal sandbox applications to both the CMA and the Bank of Uganda.