Bank of Ghana Is Drafting a Stablecoin Directive Under Act 1154

The Bank of Ghana is writing a directive for stablecoins. Governor Johnson Asiama said so on Monday at the Africa Virtual Assets Summit in Accra, describing an instrument that would set requirements for stablecoin activity and spell out which activities are permitted. It would sit under the Virtual Asset Service Providers Act, 2025, known as Act 1154, which gave virtual assets in Ghana a dedicated legal framework and divided supervision between the central bank and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Four accounts of the speech were read here. No account gives a date.

What the central bank says it is building

Asiama placed stablecoins inside the wider framework rather than beside it, calling them a priority within it. The central bank is working with the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Financial Intelligence Centre on the instruments themselves and on the supervisory arrangements that go with them, and a Virtual Assets Coordinating Committee has been inaugurated as the venue for that cooperation. Two of the four accounts quote him on why the sector is being treated in parts:

"Not all virtual asset activities present the same risks," Asiama said.

A caution attached to the plan

One account, MyJoyOnline's, reports him on the other side of the question: stablecoins may help payments and settlement, but growing adoption "could have implications for monetary sovereignty, currency substitution, capital flows". The three other accounts read here do not carry that passage and give the priority framing instead. Neither account confirms the other. The concern itself is the one the Financial Stability Board put to the G20 in October, when it called global stablecoins untested in severe stress, and local-currency arrangements have drawn central banks in before, as with the tenge memorandum Tether signed with Kazakhstan's central bank on 8 October.

The figures the accounts give, and the ones they do not

No account read here puts a number on stablecoin use in Ghana: no licensed issuer count and no transaction value. What one of them supplies instead is scale for the payments system a directive would sit over. The Sikaman Times, alone among the four, reports mobile money platforms processing more than a billion transactions worth about 519 billion cedis in August 2026. That figure stands on one account and nothing else read here confirms it.

A second account supplies a cautionary precedent in place of a Ghanaian number. TechLabari's write-up puts TerraUSD's 2022 collapse at about $40 billion of value destroyed, and notes that the cedi lost more than half its value against the dollar during the same year's currency crisis. Both lines are that outlet's framing and not the governor's. Neither appears in the other three accounts.

No date, and two regulators to agree

Monday produced an intention and a division of labour, not a text. The directive has no draft, no consultation window and no issue date in anything read here. Asiama's own framing of the gap, as The Sikaman Times reports his remarks, is that the real test will be turning the law into a framework that is credible and enforceable; the same account has him saying the job does not call for heavy-handed regulation. Those are single-sourced readings of one speech.

What would settle the question is the instrument: which issuers may operate and what reserves they would have to hold. Act 1154 has been law since 2025. The committee is seated. The directive is the part still being written.