- SEC Targets African Tokenisation Hub as it Builds Digital-Asset Surveillance Regime
Ghana is seeking to position itself as an African hub for the tokenisation of real-world assets, betting that digital representations of gold, property and securities can draw millions of retail investors into the country’s capital markets while creating new channels for domestic and international capital.
Mensah Thompson, Deputy Director-General of the Securities and Exchange Commission, said the regulator and the Bank of Ghana were working to develop a virtual-assets framework that goes beyond cryptocurrency trading and instead positions Ghana as a preferred jurisdiction for issuing tokenised real-world assets.
“We want to make Ghana the hub of tokenization,” Mr Thompson said during a NorvanReports–Economic Governance Platform X Space.
“If anybody wants to issue a real-world asset token, the definition of issuance in Africa, the definition of issuance must be Ghana.”
The ambition is significant because it shifts the conversation around digital assets away from speculative crypto trading and towards the possibility of using blockchain technology to broaden access to traditional forms of wealth.
Tokenisation allows rights to a physical or financial asset to be represented digitally and divided into smaller units. In practical terms, an investor who cannot afford an entire property, a large holding of gold or a conventional security could instead acquire fractional exposure through a regulated digital token.
The country’s capital market remains relatively shallow by international standards, and retail participation is still limited compared with the size of the population and the volume of savings held outside formal investment markets.
The SEC sees tokenisation as one possible way of changing that. “We believe that tokenization can help us deepen retail participation within the market, to help us deepen our market, improve liquidity within our market, and ensure that we are able to fractionalize traditional securities and distribute to a wider population,” Mr Thompson said.
The regulator sees potential applications across gold, real estate, land, intellectual property and conventional securities.
An expensive asset can remain out of reach for most households if ownership requires a large lump-sum investment. Fractionalisation reduces the entry threshold and could allow investors to participate in assets that have historically been accessible only to high-net-worth individuals or institutions.
That could potentially widen capital formation while improving liquidity in assets that are otherwise difficult or costly to trade. But the opportunity comes with significant regulatory risk.
If a digital unit claims to represent gold, property or another security, investors need certainty that the underlying asset actually exists, is legally owned, is properly valued and cannot be pledged simultaneously against multiple claims. That is why custody sits at the centre of the SEC’s emerging framework.
“The most principal thing is the underlying asset,” Mr Thompson said. “How is that asset custodied? Who is the custodian? And how independent is the custodian?”
Blockchain can provide a transparent record of digital transactions, but it cannot by itself guarantee that the physical asset supposedly represented by a token exists or remains unencumbered.
The integrity of the system therefore depends on legal ownership, independent custody, audit trails and enforceable investor rights. The SEC intends to impose direct controls over the creation and destruction of regulated tokens.
“You cannot issue a gold token or a token on any security without SEC approval. You cannot burn the token without SEC approval,” Mr Thompson said.
The objective is to prevent issuers from creating more digital claims than there are underlying assets. If a token represents a quantity of gold held by an independent custodian, the number of tokens in circulation would need to remain continuously reconcilable with the quantity of gold physically backing them.
That may sound technical, but it is ultimately a confidence issue. Institutional investors are unlikely to care primarily about the novelty of blockchain technology. They will care about whether ownership is legally certain, whether custody arrangements are credible, whether assets are independently audited and whether investor claims can be enforced if an issuer fails.
Mr Thompson said the Commission was working with TRM Labs and that participants in its regulatory sandbox had been integrating into a surveillance portal through which information could be reported to the regulator.
“We hope to acquire other systems and tools that will help us in fraud detection, surveillance and what have you,” he said.
Digital-asset markets operate at speeds and across borders in ways that can make traditional supervisory methods inadequate. Regulators need the ability to monitor wallets, transactions, suspicious flows, market manipulation and potential breaches in near real time.
Ghana’s strategy therefore appears to recognise that tokenisation cannot be regulated solely through licensing.
It requires a technology-enabled supervisory regime capable of monitoring the market after products have been approved.
The country’s strongest potential advantage may lie in connecting digital infrastructure to assets where Ghana already has a natural economic edge.
“We have all the gold here, and why do we have to export all the gold to another country when we can reserve the gold here, issue a token on the back of that gold, and trade the virtual token of the gold instead?” Mr Thompson said.
In theory, tokenised gold could allow Ghana to retain more physical bullion locally while enabling investors elsewhere to trade digital claims against those holdings.
It could also potentially create a new financial layer around one of the country’s most valuable natural resources.
But the model would only work if investors trusted the underlying custody, pricing and redemption structure.
A gold token that cannot be independently verified, redeemed or linked to securely held bullion would quickly lose credibility.
Tokenising real estate may allow fractional ownership and improve access, but Ghana would still need clarity over title, valuation, transfer rights, taxation, custody of legal documents and dispute resolution.
If the underlying title is contested, digitising the claim merely transfers the dispute into another format. That is why the regulatory architecture will matter as much as the technology. The SEC expects to issue tokenisation guidelines later this year and plans a major virtual-assets conference in Accra from November 2 to 4. For Ghana, the strategic opportunity is broader than simply becoming another cryptocurrency market.
The more significant ambition is to build a regulated digital layer around parts of the real economy and use that infrastructure to widen access to investment.
If successful, tokenisation could help deepen capital markets, increase retail participation, improve liquidity and create new ways of mobilising capital around assets that already exist.
It could also strengthen Ghana’s position as a regional financial-services hub if issuers and investors come to view the country as a credible jurisdiction for regulated real-world-asset tokens.
Digital assets can amplify fraud just as easily as they can expand access. Poor custody, weak disclosure, cyber breaches, false asset backing or regulatory arbitrage could destroy investor confidence quickly.
That means Ghana’s success will depend less on how fast it launches tokenised products than on whether it can build a regulatory system trusted by investors before the market scales.
The real race is therefore not simply to become Africa’s first or largest tokenisation centre. It is to become the jurisdiction where investors believe that a digital claim genuinely corresponds to a real asset, that the asset is independently safeguarded and that the regulator can intervene effectively when something goes wrong. If Ghana gets that architecture right, tokenisation could become a tool for broadening ownership and deepening the country’s capital markets.
If it gets it wrong, the same technology could magnify precisely the trust deficit the SEC is trying to overcome. That makes Ghana’s tokenisation push as much a test of regulatory credibility and market infrastructure as it is of blockchain innovation.
