Ghana’s SEC expands crypto sandbox to 20 participants

Ghana’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has added nine companies to its regulatory sandbox, bringing the total number of participants to 20. The new additions include Yellow Card and the Ghana Commodity Exchange (GCX).

Ghana’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has published the full list of companies in its ongoing regulatory sandbox. Nine more blockchain projects and companies, including Yellow Card and the Ghana Commodities Exchange (GCX) have been added to the sandbox. 

Quick catch-up: In March, the SEC launched a one-year sandbox for digital asset companies to test their products under the Commission’s supervision.

• The SEC initially admitted 11 participants, including the government-owned gold marketing and trading agency GoldBod.

Go deeper: The SEC has now expanded the companies in the sandbox to 20 and has announced the pilot activity for which these companies are admitted. 

• Notable additions include Yellow Card’s Ghanaian subsidiary and Ghana Commodity Exchange (GCX), the country’s marketplace for agricultural commodities.
• GoldBod is piloting custody for tokenized gold, while GCX is classified as a virtual asset exchange for commodities, suggesting it could be exploring commodity tokenization.

What this means: Last December, Ghana’s parliament passed the Virtual Assets Service Providers (VASP) Bill into law, giving regulators oversight of crypto activities and ending years of ambiguity. 

• The sandbox marks the next step towards a licensing regime for VASPs in Ghana.

What to watch: Tokenization projects are already common in African digital asset sandboxes, but they have largely been startup-led experiments.

• Ghana is taking a different tack by bringing GoldBod, the state’s central gold-trading institution, and GCX, its government-owned commodity exchange, into the experiment.
• It will be interesting to see what this says about Ghana’s ambitions for tokenized assets and their potential economic value.