What happened
Gizzat Baitursynov, Kazakhstan's Deputy Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development, said the country's regulated crypto market booked more than $10 billion in trading turnover in 2025, according to Crypto. News on Monday. The number captures flow through exchanges licensed under the Astana International Financial Centre (AIFC), the special jurisdiction Astana stood up to keep digital asset activity inside a defined legal perimeter.
Baitursynov tied the figure to a broader push: expanding the roster of licensed digital asset services and seeding a domestic Web3 developer base. Officials framed the milestone as validation of the pilot regime that has been running out of the AIFC since 2022, when the government began routing crypto-to-fiat conversions through a small cluster of approved venues and second-tier banks.
The publisher did not break out volume by venue, by asset, or by counterparty type in the initial report.
Why it matters
Ten billion dollars is not Binance-scale. It is, however, the first hard number the Kazakh government has attached to its onshore crypto experiment, and it lands at a moment when Central Asia is quietly turning into a corridor for regulated crypto activity that used to sit offshore. Kazakhstan spent 2021 and 2022 known mostly as a mining destination after China's ban pushed hashrate across the border.
The AIFC track was the political answer to that: instead of letting the flow stay grey, license it, tax it, and route it through banks the central bank can see. A $10B print says the pilot has cleared the threshold where it stops being a proof of concept and starts being a market.