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Tether signed a memorandum of understanding with the National Bank of Kazakhstan and the Alatau City Authority on October 7, 2026, setting out three tracks of work: a stablecoin tied to the tenge, a framework for putting real-world assets on a blockchain, and training for central bank staff. According to Decrypt, the announcement does not say which entity would issue a tenge token, and the memorandum fixes no date for either pilot.
The document is a statement of intent rather than an enforceable contract, which matters for how much of it will actually happen. Tether would bring stablecoin operations at scale and Hadron, the tokenization platform it introduced in November 2024, which the parties named as a candidate technology. The central bank would supply monetary authority, and Alatau City would serve as the testing ground.
Key facts
- Tether, the National Bank of Kazakhstan and the Alatau City Authority announced the memorandum on October 7, 2026; its first goal is a stablecoin pegged to the tenge.
- The parties will review issuance models used in other jurisdictions, choose priority asset classes for tokenization and prepare a concept and pilot proposal.
- Kazakhstan’s central bank set aside up to $350 million for crypto-linked investments in March out of nearly $70 billion in gold and foreign exchange reserves, and officials said in September that the national crypto reserve had reached $700 million, with about $200 million invested so far, mostly through hedge funds.
- Alatau is a planned $7.2 billion smart city in the Almaty region that aims to grow from 52,000 residents to two million, with President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev wanting goods and services paid for in cryptocurrency there.
- Cryptobriefing reported the parties intend to tokenize up to $60 million of projects in Alatau City by the end of 2026: up to $50 million for Iconic Tower and up to $10 million for the Birlik logistics center.
How the pilots would be built
Work on tokenization would run inside Alatau, a planned smart city in the Almaty region that operates under its own legal regime and is positioned as a fintech hub for Central Asia. The parties will pick which categories of assets to prioritize, design a model, then test it. Hadron is the named candidate for that test; Cryptobriefing reported that using it would be an operational win for Tether, while Blockchainreporter noted the arrangement carries no binding commitment for Kazakhstan to adopt Tether’s technology.
The $60 million tokenization total appeared in Cryptobriefing’s account, which splits it into the two Alatau projects; Decrypt described the same two properties as worth up to $50 million and $10 million, to be tokenized on the Kazakhstan Stock Exchange’s infrastructure. Blockchainreporter framed the deal as exploratory rather than a commitment to issue a digital currency, and quoted Deputy Governor Binur Zhalenov saying the central bank would thoroughly study international best practices on stablecoin issuance and real-world asset tokenization while keeping financial stability and investor protection as its priority.
Also read: Anchorage Digital Reportedly Cuts 17% of Staff After Tether Deal
The Tether agreement follows a separate memorandum signed days earlier. On October 2, 2026, the Kazakhstan Stock Exchange and the Alatau City Authority agreed to build platforms for digital financial assets, including multi-currency stablecoin settlement tools, per Cryptobriefing. That layering is deliberate: the central bank holds monetary authority, the exchange supplies market infrastructure, and Alatau provides the sandbox. Kazakhstan already ran a tenge stablecoin pilot called Evo, launched in September 2025 inside the central bank’s regulatory sandbox by the exchange Intebix and Eurasian Bank with help from Solana and Mastercard, where the central bank wrote the rules without issuing the token itself.
Why it matters
Stablecoins in circulation are overwhelmingly dollar-denominated, so a working tenge version would give Kazakhstan’s currency a presence in on-chain finance it does not currently have. The memorandum also extends a pattern: the country has placed digital-asset activity under central bank oversight and has signed comparable agreements with exchanges before, including a stablecoin and digital-payments deal with Binance, plus a national cryptocurrency analytics center. For Tether, this adds another outpost beyond its core USDT business, following initiatives it has pursued in Africa and the Gulf, as Blockchainreporter noted.
The timing is not neutral. Decrypt reported the deal landed days after a Senate subcommittee report on Iran-linked USDT use and a lawsuit over a $2.76 million Tether freeze — the kind of scrutiny that makes central bank partnerships a useful signal for the issuer.
What to watch
The concrete test is whether the Iconic Tower and Birlik logistics center tokenizations actually close before the end of 2026, and which platform handles them. Tether wants Hadron chosen. The other question is whether the tenge stablecoin work advances alongside the KASE settlement tools, since the central bank has said nothing will be issued unless a pilot succeeds and regulators approve. This is not financial advice; crypto markets are volatile and outcomes here are uncertain.
Reported by decrypt.co.
Sources: Decrypt, Cryptobriefing, Blockchainreporter