The president of Kazakhstan has issued a stark warning that crypto-enabled capital flight now poses a direct threat to national financial stability.
Speaking at a meeting of the Financial Monitoring Agency in Astana on 28 Jan, President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev stated that attempts to move wealth abroad through cryptocurrency schemes persist and require reliable blocking. He framed the issue as a matter of economic and national security, signalling a shift from promotion to protection.
A parallel exit valve
Tokayev’s intervention highlights a systemic failure to control the flow of domestic capital. Trillions of tenge allocated to social programmes are reportedly being siphoned off through underground digital channels that escape state oversight. Authorities have already dismantled more than 130 illegal crypto exchanges with a combined turnover exceeding 62bn tenge ($124mn). Despite these enforcement actions, illicit cash-out advertisements continue to proliferate on social media platforms, suggesting the regulator is losing the game of whack-a-mole.
The scale of the problem is best illustrated by a single domestic bank case where 7tn tenge ($13.8bn) was routed abroad during 2025. Tokayev described the transaction as outrageous from a legal and economic standpoint. This massive outflow occurs as the tenge remains structurally vulnerable, pressured by oil-export disruptions and Kazakhstan’s role as a financial transit state for Russian-linked flows. For the citizens of Kazakhstan, digital assets represent a rational escape from a soft currency and the constant threat of capital controls.
The middle country dilemma
This crackdown creates a significant tension with Kazakhstan’s broader ambitions. The country has spent years positioning itself as a regulated digital asset hub, notably launching the first spot Bitcoin ETF in Central Asia. The Astana International Financial Centre was designed to attract global fintech investment, yet the president is now forced to treat the same technology as a hostile exit valve.
To regain control, Tokayev recently signed the Law on Banks and Banking Activities, granting the central bank explicit authority to license exchanges and restrict trading. This legislative move aims to formalise the market while protecting the tenge from becoming a secondary casualty of global de-dollarisation. However, the technological reality remains clear. Defending a national currency in the onchain era has moved beyond the remit of the central bank; it has become a technological arms race between states and capital. With the digital dollar economy surpassing $33tn in volume and eclipsing traditional rails, countries like Kazakhstan find themselves struggling to maintain sovereignty over their own borders.
