Kazakhstan Allocates $100m to Crypto Funds as Long-Term Money Accumulates
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WHAT HAPPENED
Kazakhstan’s central bank operations department head announced a $100 million investment across cryptocurrency-focused funds including Ege DeFi and Brevan Howard Digital, in addition to a $90 million investment in ETFs focused on bitcoin, at a conference in Almaty, Bloomberg reported.
This is the latest in the central Asian country’s steady string of crypto-related investments and developments, which span direct capital allocation, bitcoin mining, and KZTE, a stablecoin backed by the tenge, the national currency. In September 2025, the country announced the formation of the Alem Fund, the country’s state-backed crypto investment fund, which included initial purchases of Binance’s BNB token. It came around the same time as the announcement of the KZTE stablecoin on Solana, which was launched in collaboration with Mastercard, Intebix, and Eurasian Bank. Since then, the country has announced several initiatives, including a National Bank allocation of up to $350 million in bitcoin and crypto-related investments (announced March 2026); a mining-funded reserve (announced in July 2026) which feeds off of the heavy presence of bitcoin miners in the country; and a plan to use cryptocurrencies seized from criminal networks to build up its strategic reserve (announced January 2026). Kazakhstan is also the new home to former Coinbase CTO and a16z general partner Balaji Srinivasan’s Network School, which relocated there this year from Malaysia.
While many of the crypto-related initiatives announced by Kazakhstan have come over the last year to year and a half, the country has been closely intertwined with the industry over the last half decade. Mining load in the country was only about 200 megawatts in early 2020, but it became a top destination after China’s 2021 crackdown, when miners relocated machines across the border to take advantage of the cheap power and proximity to China. By October 2021, mining load had reached an estimated 1.5 GW, making Kazakhstan the world’s second-largest mining hub at the time. The boom ultimately strained the grid, and the government responded with power cuts and a mining tax that took effect in 2022.
The central bank official’s announcement is a follow-through on prior ones and the country’s general crypto plan, which is a trend that can be observed across other sovereigns and long-term capital allocators.
OUR TAKE
Kazakhstan’s announcement is an example of a broader trend we have been observing, in which wealth managers and sovereigns are steadily adding bitcoin and crypto exposure while macro and tactical traders dump.
Segmenting bitcoin ETF 13F filers by net added and reduced exposure shows this trend plainly. Money managers’ 13F filings tell us about many of the institutional sellers, and they are the basis traders and the macro tourists. Reporting institutions held 355k BTC-equivalent of the spot ETFs at the Sept. 30, 2025, quarter-end, the last before the high, and 307k by June 2026 (-14%). The decline sits almost entirely with the multi-strategy and macro funds, basis desks, and bank trading books that used the ETFs for carry and momentum. Millennium Management, Brevan Howard, Goldman Sachs Group, Capula Management, Farallon Capital, D. E. Shaw, Schonfeld Strategic Advisors, Symmetry Investments and Tudor Investment Corp cut their holdings by 29% to 100%, or 68k BTC between the nine of them. That is more than the 48k BTC decline across all 2,200 filers, so every other filer, in aggregate, added.
Wealth platforms and sovereign funds bought what the tourists sold. Morgan Stanley’s wealth arm, Mubadala Investment Company (an Abu Dhabi SWF), and the Abu Dhabi Investment Council added, while investment manager Horizon Kinetics held. The non-filer base of advisors, family offices, and individuals fell only 6.6% while the price fell 49%. The ETFs’ holdings dropped 11% from peak to trough against a 53% fall in the price, and they have added 87k BTC since the June low while leveraged funds’ shorts fell. That pattern points to directional buying, not carry.
Source: https://www.galaxy.com/insights/research/why-now-bitcoin-buy-hold-2026
The trend is not monolithic, and sovereigns aren’t blindly advancing into crypto and blockchain-related strategies, however. Ukraine’s central bank recently opposed a crypto bill, citing monetary sovereignty concerns as the motivating factor, and is asking regulators to redraft it before a final vote is indicative of possibly more mindful approaches. The bank stated it supports a European Union MiCA-style regulation but has overarching concerns around the possible impact of foreign-issued tokens on monetary sovereignty and financial stability.
The common theme is control. Kazakhstan and other sovereigns are no longer weighing whether to engage with crypto, but how to do it on terms that keep value and oversight within the state’s reach. Kazakhstan is building exposure through funds, seized coins and mining, and has launched its own stablecoin backed by its national currency, the tenge. Ukraine’s central bank is pressing the same principle from the other direction, backing MiCA-style rules while resisting foreign tokens that could function as money outside its supervision.
The big picture is that governments are warming to bitcoin and crypto as assets and infrastructure, but the terms on which they do so vary. Today, the terms favor regulated, state-adjacent channels over open-ended, unchecked access.
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