Tether has signed a memorandum of understanding with the National Bank of Kazakhstan (NBK) and the Alatau City Authority to explore a stablecoin pegged to the Kazakhstani tenge.
The agreement was announced on October 7, 2026. It is exploratory. The three parties will study how other countries issue stablecoins, define possible use cases, and prepare a concept and pilot proposal for a tenge-pegged token. No issuance date, blockchain, reserve structure, or commercial issuer has been announced.
The MoU covers three workstreams. First, the partners will build the groundwork for digital finance in Kazakhstan, reviewing stablecoin issuance models from other jurisdictions. Second, they will design an asset tokenization framework, pick priority asset classes, and plan a pilot inside Alatau City, a special economic zone with its own legal regime built to encourage financial technology. Tether’s Hadron platform, its tokenization infrastructure, is named as a candidate technology for the pilot.
Third, the parties will run workshops and training for central bank staff and government agencies on stablecoin reserves, issuance, and tokenization. 
NBK Deputy Governor Binur Zhalenov said the central bank will study international approaches while prioritizing financial stability, transaction transparency, and investor protection.
Kazakhstan’s digital push keeps accelerating
The MoU lands in the middle of Kazakhstan’s aggressive move into digital money. In September, the government approved a 65-measure plan across ten areas to develop the country’s digital asset industry, covering tokenization, digital payments, international settlements, and mining. The government also told its Energy and Digital ministries to develop a way to use gas and coal power to supply mining centers. Kazakhstan ranked among the world’s top ten Bitcoin producers in 2025, according to the government.
This is not the country’s first tenge stablecoin experiment. In September 2025, Kazakhstan ran a tenge-backed stablecoin pilot with Intebix, Solana, and Mastercard as partners. The NBK already regulates stablecoins and tokenized real assets under rules that took effect in May 2026.
Tether, best known as the issuer of USDT, has been pushing deeper into state-level partnerships. Its stablecoin business now runs alongside investments in energy, payments, and tokenization infrastructure. For a company that backed bringing USDT onto Bitcoin’s Lightning Network, a central bank MoU is the same playbook at sovereign scale: distribution first, issuance follows.
The open question is whether the pilot ever becomes a product. The MoU commits Kazakhstan to nothing. But with the legal framework in place, a sandbox city ready, and Tether holding the pen on the proposal, the path from concept to pilot is shorter than it looks.
