Tether Signs a Tenge Stablecoin Memorandum With Kazakhstan's Central Bank

Kazakhstan's central bank has put its name to a second stablecoin study in a month. The National Bank of Kazakhstan, Tether and the Alatau City Authority signed a memorandum of understanding, announced on Wednesday, covering a possible token pegged to the tenge, a framework for tokenizing real-world assets, and training for central bank staff. Nothing in it authorizes a stablecoin. No budget, timeline, issuer or reserve design was disclosed, and the central bank is not committed to using Tether's technology. The announcement came a month after the same bank signed a comparable memorandum with Binance.

Three workstreams, none of them a product

The first task is research. The parties will look at how stablecoins are issued elsewhere, then write a concept and a pilot proposal for a tenge-pegged token. The second is a tokenization framework, with priority asset categories to be identified and a pilot planned inside Alatau's jurisdiction. The third is teaching: workshops for National Bank specialists and other government staff on issuance, reserve management and tokenization. All five accounts read for this story describe the same three tracks, and all five call the agreement exploratory. Tether's Hadron platform is named as candidate infrastructure for the tokenization work and is not confirmed for it.

The central bank will "thoroughly study international best practices in stablecoin issuance and real-world asset tokenization," Binur Zhalenov, its deputy governor, said in the announcement.

Zhalenov's other line is reported two ways. The Crypto Times has him saying financial stability, transaction transparency and investor protection remain the "paramount priority for the National Bank." coincu prints a longer version of the same sentence, and the two wordings do not reconcile. Paolo Ardoino, Tether's chief executive, said Kazakhstan is taking "a deliberate, forward-looking approach by exploring asset tokenization," in a quote Cryptopolitan marks as cut for length. The Crypto Times paraphrases the same remarks and quotes none of them.

Inside the Alatau regime

Alatau is a special legal zone near Almaty, in force in stages since 1 July, written to draw financial technology firms. Cryptopolitan calls it Kazakhstan's "CryptoCity," says it borrows from Dubai and Singapore, and adds that disputes can go to the Astana International Financial Centre or to international arbitration. That second detail rests on Cryptopolitan alone. The city is already carrying crypto payments. Binance Pay runs across 5,000 point-of-sale terminals through Alatau City Bank, converting digital assets, mostly USDT, into tenge for merchants, again on Cryptopolitan's count only. It is also where the National Bank wants its pilot to land. In September the bank's governor, Timur Suleimenov, set out a plan to tokenize up to $60 million of projects by the end of this year, split between the Iconic Tower complex and the Birlik logistics centre.

How large the counterparty is depends on who is counting

Tether's own size is reported two ways in the same week. CoinDesk puts about $140 billion of USDT in circulation. coincu gives a market capitalisation of $184.05 billion from CoinGecko and a circulating supply of $184.30 billion from DeFiLlama. We could not establish which basis produces which figure, and neither account explains the gap. Its tokenized gold product, XAUT, is put at roughly $3.3 billion backed by bullion in Swiss vaults, on CoinDesk alone. Central banks elsewhere are working the same question, and the ECB has mapped three routes to putting central bank money onchain.

What would have to happen next

A memorandum is not a licence. For a tenge token to exist the pilot proposal has to be written, the central bank has to approve it, and the country's regulated market has to absorb it. Of 35 providers licensed through the Astana financial centre, 11 are digital asset exchanges, serving about 270,000 clients. Two government figures for the market's total transaction value disagree with each other, so neither is used here. Tether has been collecting approvals elsewhere on its own schedule, and its gold token picked up a Shariah compliance certification this year. What the announcement does not contain is a date. No outlet read here puts one on the pilot, and the National Bank has not said when the concept paper is due.