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Kazakhstan Approves Strategic Crypto Mining Framework

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Kazakhstan Approves Strategic Crypto Mining Framework

Kazakhstan, one of the world’s largest Bitcoin mining hubs, approved a new framework for large-scale crypto mining that links access to electricity with contributions to a state-backed digital asset reserve.

The government approved rules for strategic digital mining on July 18, Kazakhstan-based news outlet Zakon.kz reported Wednesday, citing Government Resolution No. 638 published in the PRG.kz legal database.

The rules define strategic digital mining as a framework that gives miners access to electricity quotas at regulated tariffs in exchange for transferring part of their mined crypto assets to Astana Hub, a government-backed technology cluster.

Kazakhstan ranked fifth globally by Bitcoin mining activity in the Cambridge Digital Mining Industry Report published in April 2025.

New rules set higher bar for strategic miners

Under the new framework, miners seeking strategic status must meet strict infrastructure requirements before receiving approval.

According to Zakon.kz, applicants need to own a digital mining data center with at least 150 megawatts (MW) of capacity and use mining hardware where each unit has a minimum computing power of 150 terahashes per second (TH/s).

Kazakhstan ranked fifth globally by Bitcoin mining activity. Source: Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance.

The rules also require miners to have qualified technical staff, repair facilities at their data centers, multiple internet service contracts and be up to date on required tax and other payments. The government resolution will enter into force on Aug. 1, 2026, according to Zakon.kz.

Miners must transfer part of mined assets

Approved miners must sign agreements with Astana Hub’s autonomous cluster fund and buy electricity from eligible power-generating companies under the new framework.

The rules require miners to transfer part of their mined crypto assets to a reserve mechanism, but they do not specify the share. Local media reports cited a 10% transfer rate, though Cointelegraph could not independently verify that figure.

Source: National Business Kazakhstan/Telegram

The new mining rules build on Kazakhstan’s broader push to develop state-backed digital asset infrastructure. In September 2025, Kazakhstan launched the Alem Crypto Fund, a state-backed vehicle focused on long-term digital asset reserves, with its first investment involving BNB through a partnership with Binance Kazakhstan.

Related: Kazakhstan president signs decree to accelerate crypto adoption

The country has also moved toward wider crypto adoption through regulated financial services. In July 2026, Alatau City Bank and Binance Kazakhstan launched Crypto Pay, a service allowing users to make crypto payments through QR codes and point-of-sale terminals connected to the bank’s acquiring network.

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Mubadala Capital tokenizes private markets fund on Solana, Sui, Base as Coinbase takes exposure

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Mubadala Capital tokenizes private markets fund on Solana, Sui, Base as Coinbase takes exposure

Tokenization has become one of the fastest-growing corners of digital assets as traditional finance firms look to modernize fund infrastructure. Citi recently projected that tokenized securities could grow to roughly $5.5 trillion by 2030, while Boston Consulting Group and Ripple estimate tokenized assets across all asset classes could reach $18.9 trillion by 2033.

Creating blockchain-based tokens of existing funds could help broaden access to a new set of investors and open the door for fund shares to be used as collateral or plugged into other onchain financial applications.

For this particular case, KAIO provides the infrastructure that issues and administers Mubadala Capital’s tokenized fund. The company said Mubadala joins firms including Hamilton Lane, Brevan Howard and Laser Digital that use its platform to distribute investment products onchain, and currently has $144 million in tokenized funds on its platform.

“This strategy was built on differentiated access — to deal flow, to co-investment, to a global network that most investors cannot reach on their own,” Max Franzetti, head of Mubadala Capital Solutions, said in a statement. “Bringing it onchain extends that access to a new class of qualified investors without compromising the institutional discipline that defines how we invest.”

Brett Tejpaul, head of Coinbase Institutional, said that Coinbase adding the fund to its corporate balance sheet investment is a reflection of growing interest in regulated tokenized assets as treasury holdings. “As regulated assets become programmable, they can become part of a broader onchain economy that is more transparent, composable and accessible to qualified investors in eligible jurisdictions.”

Digital Chamber Sues Illinois Officials over 0.2% Crypto Tax

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Digital Chamber Sues Illinois Officials over 0.2% Crypto Tax

Cointelegraph is committed to providing independent, high-quality journalism across the crypto, blockchain, AI, and fintech industries.

All news, reviews, and analyses are produced with full journalistic independence and integrity. For more details on our standards and processes, please read our Editorial Policy.

South Korea’s Korbit exchange is now part of the $1 tillion Mirae Group family

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South Korea’s Korbit exchange is now part of the $1 tillion Mirae Group family

Korbit, South Korea’s first homegrown crypto exchange founded in 2013, now has a new home and its a traditional finance behemoth.

The exchange announced Thursday that it is now part of the Mirae Asset Group family, which reportedly had an AUM of $1 trillion as of May.

The acquiring entity is Mirae Asset Consulting, an affiliate of Mirae Asset Group, which has acquired Korbit’s shares through mandated regulatory reporting procedures, becoming the largest shareholder. The announcement clarified that there are no changes to Korbit Co., Ltd., the corporation that operates Korbit.

The affiliate firm also looks after the group’s hotels and golf course businesses and now reportedly holds a 97.15% stake in Korbit.

For the exchange users, the acquisition by the Mirae affiliate brings no immediate disruption. The exchange said that all services, such as login, trading, deposits and withdrawals, will continue without interruption. User deposits and virtual assets will continue to be held separately from company assets, consistent with South Korea’s Act on the Protection of Virtual Asset Users. Personal data processing also remains unchanged and requires no action from users.

Arbitrum-based AFX Trade drained of $24 million after bridge keys compromised

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Arbitrum-based AFX Trade drained of $24 million after bridge keys compromised

Another week, another multi-million-dollar hack in DeFi, and once again, it’s an off-chain compromise rather than a smart contract exploit.

AFX Trade, a decentralized perpetuals exchange that settles in dollar-pegged stablecoin USDC, was drained of about $24.15 million on Wednesday after an attacker compromised the validator signing keys behind a bridge the protocol operates on Arbitrum, blockchain data shows.

In other words, the smart contract did what it’s supposed to do – verify the signature and execute the transaction. The problem was with the private keys that generated those signatures, as attackers compromised the private validator signing keys (hot keys held offchain by the bridge operators or validators).

Steven Goldfeder, co-founder of Offchain Labs, which develops and maintains the network, said the Arbitrum native bridge “has not been hacked or exploited in any way” and that the transaction originated from a third-party protocol.

A hack of Arbitrum’s own bridge would signal risk across the entire layer-2 network, but a compromised protocol running on top of it is a contained failure.

Nothing in the bridge’s own code logic was broken. Bridges are blockchain-based tools for transferring tokens between various networks, including those they were not initially supported on.

SEC Pays $150,000 Settle Coinbase FOIA Suit

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SEC Pays $150,000 Settle Coinbase FOIA Suit

The US Securities and Exchange Commission agreed to pay $150,000 in legal fees to settle a Coinbase lawsuit seeking internal records from the agency at the height of the Biden-era SEC crackdown on crypto. 

The agreement, filed on Wednesday, ends a two-year lawsuit between the SEC and Coinbase, in which the crypto exchange sought internal documents from the regulator to uncover evidence of “crypto by enforcement.” An internal report in 2025 revealed the SEC had deleted nearly a year of former SEC Chair Gary Gensler’s texts due to “avoidable” errors. 

“The agency tasked with policing corporate record-keeping somehow lost reams of its own text messages between Mr. Gensler and other officials during the most intense period of the anti-crypto campaign,” said Coinbase chief legal officer Paul Grewal in an op-ed published by the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, adding that the SEC will pay a $150,000 “award” and has fixed its record retention policies. 

The settlement marks another legal victory for Coinbase under the Trump administration. The SEC, under the leadership of Paul Atkins, has taken a more crypto-friendly approach and dropped several high-profile enforcement actions against crypto companies, including Coinbase, in 2025.

Related: Coinbase chief legal officer to transition to advisory role on July 31 

In February, Coinbase reached a settlement with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, with the FDIC agreeing to pay $188,440 in legal fees and revising aspects of its transparency practices after a federal court found it had violated the Freedom of Information Act. 

“The years of litigation were worth it. We successfully uncovered dozens of crypto ‘pause letters’—indisputable proof of OCP2.0 and the coordinated effort to sideline the industry,” Grewal said in an X post in February. 

Grewal to transition from chief legal officer

Paul Grewal, who has served as Coinbase’s chief legal officer since 2020, is set to transition to an advisory role at the exchange starting on July 31, with Coinbase legal vice presidents Molly Abraham and Ryan VanGrack set to become general counsel and vice chair, respectively.

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BTC wilts as Clarity Act odds tumble. U.S. deploys B1 bomber against Iran

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BTC wilts as Clarity Act odds tumble. U.S. deploys B1 bomber against Iran

Bond markets are already reacting. The U.S. two-year Treasury yield jumped to 4.31%, its highest level since February 2025, while the benchmark 10-year yield rose to 4.66%, the highest since May, according to TradingView data. Higher yields raise the opportunity cost of holding non-yielding assets such as bitcoin and gold, often prompting investors to rotate out of speculative holdings and into fixed-income securities that now offer more attractive returns.

Adding to the cautious market sentiment, Axios reported that the U.S. military deployed a B-1 long-range bomber on Tuesday to strike targets linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The use of the heavy bomber represents a clear escalation in the scale of U.S. operations and suggests Washington may be preparing for a broader campaign, rather than continuing with the more limited strikes seen in recent days.

Regulatory uncertainty persisted after a group of key Senate Democrats said the newest draft of the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act (Clarity Act) “falls short” on ethics and other critical provisions.

Betting markets on decentralized platform Polymarket reacted swiftly, with the implied odds of the Clarity Act passing tumbling from 46% to 38%.

Senate Republicans released the updated draft earlier Wednesday, which includes an ethics provision agreed to by the White House and President Donald Trump. Senator Bernie Moreno called it “the most powerful ethics language in U.S. history.

Whales accumulate as small holders capitulate

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Whales accumulate as small holders capitulate

Payments-focused cryptocurrency XRP’s price has risen over 8% in five weeks and during this time, there has been a notable divergence in accumulation trends of large holders or whales and small holders.

According to on-chain data from Santiment, wallets holding between 100,000 and 100 million XRP added 2.8% more coins to their balances over the past five weeks. This accumulation by whales and sharks coincided with the token rebounding to $1.16 from $1 at the end of June, suggesting stronger hands are leaning into the current price action.

At the same time, the smallest wallets have shed 5.2% of their holdings during the same period. This capitulation by small holders stands in sharp contrast to the buying pressure from key stakeholders.

These diverging trends are bullish for XRP, according to Santiment.

“Historically, XRP price has tended to move more with key stakeholders and against the smallest retail wallets, so this split supports the bullish case behind the bounce,” the firm noted on X.

The timing aligns with several positive fundamental developments for XRP such as Improved institutional access through potential ETF products and continued utility on the XRP Ledger for payments, tokenization, and the RLUSD stablecoin, the firm explained,

The next big AI trade could be crypto and blockchain

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The next big AI trade could be crypto and blockchain

That shift is already beginning. Robinhood launched AI-powered investing tools in May that let agents trade stocks and make purchases for users. CEO Vlad Tenev has said AI agents will eventually rival the capabilities of human traders, while OpenAI and Anthropic are racing to build increasingly autonomous systems that can navigate software and complete complex tasks on their own.

For Kaul, those agents introduce a problem that today’s payment systems weren’t built to solve.

Many transactions between AI agents could be worth only fractions of a cent, such as paying for an API call, a second of computing power or access to a dataset. Traditional payment networks become expensive when fees cost more than the transaction itself.

That’s where Kaul believes blockchains come in.

She argued public blockchain networks are better suited to machine-to-machine payments because they offer programmable transactions, cryptographic identity and near-instant settlement. Instead of relying on banks or card networks, AI agents could hold digital assets and pay one another directly over blockchain rails.

If that happens at scale, demand for blockchain networks could grow alongside AI adoption.

Since agents would need native cryptocurrencies to pay network fees, Kaul argued rising transaction volumes could increase demand for those tokens while generating more revenue for developer incentives, network security and decentralized applications.

SEC’s Peirce Warns Onchain Lending May Trigger Securities Laws

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SEC’s Peirce Warns Onchain Lending May Trigger Securities Laws

SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce said crypto vaults and onchain lending products may fall under US securities laws, urging developers to assess whether products that actively manage user assets require regulatory compliance.

In a statement published Wednesday, Peirce said crypto vaults and lending strategies that involve discretionary decisions, including allocating assets, selecting yield-generating activities, setting lending terms and determining liquidation thresholds, may fall within the scope of federal securities laws depending on their structure and operation.

She said some vaults could be treated as securities offerings or investment companies, while parties managing vault allocations or lending parameters could also trigger investment adviser requirements.

Peirce said that some onchain loans may also qualify as securities depending on how they are structured, distributed and used.

“Moving activities that fall within the scope of the federal securities laws onchain, as a general matter, does not take those activities outside the scope of the laws the Commission administers,” Peirce said.

Peirce urged developers and operators to consult the SEC if their products may fall within its jurisdiction and invited feedback on how existing rules could better accommodate onchain finance.

Related: SEC sues Mining Automatic and founder over alleged $22M crypto mining scheme

Crypto vaults grow as regulators scrutinize onchain yield products

Crypto vaults pool user assets into onchain strategies designed to generate yield through lending markets, staking or liquidity pools. Their use has expanded this year as companies package sophisticated DeFi strategies into products aimed at both retail and institutional investors.

In April, Sentora opened its Smart Yield platform to the public, allowing users to compare and access DeFi vaults based on strategy, yield and risk metrics. Earlier, Wallet in Telegram launched self-custodial Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH) and USDT (USDT) vaults that provide automated yield generation without requiring users to transfer assets to a centralized custodian.

Kraken followed in May with a Bitcoin vault offering up to 2.5% variable APY by deploying wrapped Bitcoin across decentralized lending protocols including Aave and Morpho. Rewards are paid in Bitcoin and fluctuate based on borrowing demand in the underlying markets.

The products have also exposed users to technical risks. In December, decentralized finance protocol Yearn disclosed a roughly $9 million exploit affecting its legacy yETH yield vault, though the protocol said its V2 and V3 vaults were not effected.

If crypto vaults were to fall under federal securities laws, their operators could be required to register with the SEC or qualify for exemptions while complying with disclosure and other regulatory requirements.

Source: Yearnfi

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