Kazakhstan's central bank signs Tether MoU to study tenge stablecoin

The National Bank of Kazakhstan, Tether and the Alatau City Authority signed a memorandum of understanding to study stablecoins, asset tokenization and decentralized finance, with a stablecoin pegged to the Kazakhstani tenge among the items on the agenda. The scope is wider than the currency: the three parties will examine how similar tokens work elsewhere, identify possible uses and prepare a proposal for a pilot, according to the announcement. The agreement, disclosed Wednesday, is exploratory and does not amount to a decision to issue the token.

Tokenization gets a parallel track. The parties describe it as creating blockchain-based representations of assets, potentially allowing anything from bonds to real estate to be transferred, traded or used as collateral through digital networks. Their task is to identify which asset types could be suitable and to plan a pilot in Alatau, a city operating under a special legal regime designed in part to encourage financial technology. Tether's Hadron platform, which provides infrastructure for issuing and managing tokenized assets, is one technology being considered for the project.

The memorandum also commits Tether and the Kazakh authorities to workshops on stablecoin reserves, issuance and tokenization for central bank staff and other government agencies, which is where the reserve design of any tenge token would meet its first scrutiny. "As part of piloting tokenization projects, we intend to thoroughly study international best practices in stablecoin issuance and real-world asset tokenization," NBK Deputy Governor Binur Zhalenov said.

Tether brings scale and a wide product line to the table. It issues USDT, described in the coverage as the world's largest dollar stablecoin with about $140 billion in circulation, along with XAUT, a roughly $3.3 billion tokenized gold product backed by physical bullion held in Swiss vaults. The company has been expanding beyond stablecoins into energy, payments, commodities and tokenization infrastructure.

The central bank is a signatory rather than a regulator weighing someone else's application, which puts the reserve question inside the institution that would otherwise supervise it. The announcement does not say which asset types would be tokenized first, what would back a tenge token, or who would hold those reserves. Kazakhstan has been building out its digital-asset framework while keeping the central bank closely involved in the process, and the pilot proposal is the document that will show whether a study of reserves and issuance turns into a product.