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{
    "id": 1583320,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1583320/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 278,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Molo, UDA",
    "speaker_title": "Hon. Kuria Kimani",
    "speaker": null,
    "content": " Hon. Temporary Speaker, before I move the Bill for Second Reading, I want to take a minute to welcome these great girls to the National Assembly and to also inform them that the great Nakuru County is also bestowed and gifted with many elected women leaders. We have Hon. Martha Wangari, the Member for Gilgil; Hon. Jayne Kihara, the Member for Naivasha; Hon. Irene Mrembo, the Member for Bahati; Hon. Charity Kathambi, the Member for Njoro; our Governor, Susan Kihika; and our Senator, Tabitha Keroche. They call us the county of girls. That shows you that women have power and they can fight alongside men and win seats. You should emulate the great ladies of Homa Bay and Nakuru counties. I am confident that you will become great leaders in the Republic of Kenya. I also want to caution our brothers and sisters from Central Kenya. Whenever there is a grammar issue, we need to be very careful not to pick a fight with our brothers and sisters from the Lakeside because we will lose that fight for sure as Hon. Wamuchomba has witnessed on the Floor of the House this afternoon. Hon. Temporary Speaker, I beg to move that The Virtual Asset Providers Bill (National Assembly Bill No.15 of 2025) be now read a Second Time. This Bill was published on 17th March 2025 and referred to the Departmental Committee on Finance and National Planning for consideration. Before I get to the nitty- gritty, I want to share with you a few quotes from businesspeople across the world. The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of BlackRock reminds us that virtual assets are reshaping the entire financial landscape. There are huge opportunities for interactions. One of the most respected names in this space is David Solomon who says that cryptocurrencies have defined what it means to store and transfer value. Kenya is ranked third in Africa in on-chain weighted transactions volume. In the last one year, Kenya traded US$2 billion in decentralised protocols, liquidity aggression and synthetic platforms. We have approximately 6.1 million users who use Electric Vehicle (EV) capabilities, Chain-key Tokens, Crypto bridges, Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC), gas subtracted Stablecoins and Zero-Knowledge (Zk) Rollups deployment. We have potential in this space to generate at least US$1 billion in terms of foreign direct investment. The passage of this Bill has the potential to create, at least, 25,000 jobs in Kenya in the next one year. We look forward to the new Blockchain technology and tokenisation being used to solve the challenge of budgetary allocation in our country. The Controller of Budget estimates that we have approximately Ksh550 billion worth of pending bills. I look forward to when this can be tokenised so that we can have people across Kenya and around the globe contributing to this space without constraining the Exchequer to be given the limited fiscal space we have in our budget. What are we doing as a nation to embrace this novel innovation in finance that the world is already embracing? At the very least, if this House considers and passes this Bill, Kenya will be the fourth country in Africa to do so by maintaining a progressive spirit of building Kenya to be the Silicon Savannah. Virtual assets are digital representation of value that are created, usually by mining. They are traded or transferred in the digital sphere often using Blockchain or other Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT). They have many uses. They can be used as a medium of exchange, a unit of account, a store of value, or even for investment purposes, The electronic version of the Official Hansard Report is for informationpurposes only. A certified version of this Report can be obtained from the Hansard Editor."
}