In brief
- Tether signed a memorandum of understanding with the National Bank of Kazakhstan and the Alatau City Authority to prepare a pilot proposal for a tenge-pegged stablecoin and an asset tokenization framework.
- Kazakhstan's central bank earmarked up to $350 million for crypto-linked investments in March, and officials said in September that the national crypto reserve has reached $700 million.
- The deal lands days after a Senate subcommittee report on Iran-linked USDT use and a lawsuit over a $2.76 million Tether freeze.
Tether, the company behind the world's largest stablecoin, signed a memorandum of understanding with the National Bank of Kazakhstan and the Alatau City Authority, the company announced Wednesday.
The memorandum’s first goal is a stablecoin pegged to the tenge, Kazakhstan's currency. The three parties will study how other countries issue them and then prepare a concept and pilot proposal, though the announcement does not say who would issue the token.
On tokenization—recording ownership of something real, like a building or a bond, as a digital token on a blockchain—the parties will pick priority asset categories, design a model and launch a pilot inside Alatau, possibly on Hadron, the tokenization platform Tether launched in November 2024. The memorandum sets no date for either pilot.
A memorandum is a written statement of what the parties plan to explore together, so think handshake, not contract. The deal also includes workshops to train central bank staff on issuing tokens, managing reserves and tokenizing assets.
Alatau is a planned smart city in the Almaty region, built from scratch with its own legal regime and pitched as a fintech hub for Central Asia. The $7.2 billion project aims to grow from 52,000 residents to two million, with President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev wanting people there to pay for goods and services in cryptocurrency.
→In March, the central bank earmarked up to $350 million for crypto-related investments out of nearly $70 billion in gold and foreign exchange reserves, though the money may go into shares of crypto-linked companies and index funds rather than coins.
Officials said in September that the national crypto reserve has reached $700 million, with about $200 million invested so far, mostly through hedge funds, which are private pools that trade on behalf of large investors.
Kazakhstan already runs a tenge stablecoin pilot called Evo, launched in September 2025 inside the central bank's regulatory sandbox—a supervised testing ground for new financial products—and was issued by the exchange Intebix and Eurasian Bank with help from Solana and Mastercard. The central bank writes the rules of the test but does not issue the token.
The National Bank has a separate plan to tokenize two Alatau properties, worth up to $50 million and $10 million, due by the end of 2026 on the Kazakhstan Stock Exchange's infrastructure.