In 2023 Kazakhstan banned 980 cryptocurrency exchanges
This year Kazakhstan government agencies showed very strict action against the unregistered crypto exchanges.
Kazakhstan is a very friendly jurisdiction for the crypto sector. In late 2021, Kazakhstan welcomed all the Crypto mining companies to set up their business in the country, following the China Crypto blanket ban. The crypto sector is fully regulated under precise rules & laws in this country and corresponding regulatory bodies are accepting Crypto licence applications from crypto companies.
On 7 Dec 2023, The Kazakhstan government published a report and confirmed that this year country’s Financial Monitoring Agency (FMA) blocked a total of 980 crypto exchanges which were providing Crypto services in the country without any legal authority or registration.
The FMA agency also initiated an investigation against 9 crypto exchanges which were not only providing services without registration but also were involved in money laundering activities.
FMA chairman Ruslan Ostroumov disclosed that these 9 exchanges were linked with crypto money laundering in connection with China.
The Astana International Financial Center (AIFC) is responsible for the regulatory approval for the crypto companies so that such companies can service under the country’s new digital assets laws which were introduced in Feb of this year.
At present Binance, Bybit, CaspianEx, Biteeu, ATAIX, Upbit and Xignal&MT are the only regulated crypto exchanges in this country.
One month ago, Kazakhstan also blocked access to Coinbase’s crypto services for the citizens, as the exchange failed to comply with the country’s new crypto laws.
At the time many reports claimed that Coinbase would handle the matter to bring services back soon but so far Coinbase is on the blacklist.
In Oct 2021 Bitcoin mining hash rate contribution of Kazakhstan was 18%, the second highest, but this year this figure plummeted to 4% because the government introduced new power tariffs & taxes and also the mining companies failed to get continuous electricity supply. To get out of the struggling phase, the majority of the crypto mining companies shifted their business to other countries slowly-2.
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