Kazakhstan Takes a 10% Cut of Miners’ Bitcoin

Kazakhstan has found a way to build a national crypto reserve without spending a tenge on bitcoin. It will take the coins from the people already making them. Under Government Resolution No. 638, effective August 1, the country’s largest industrial miners must transfer a share of what they mine each month to a state-linked fund, which routes the coins into a national reserve managed by the National Bank’s investment arm.

The framework arrived in two steps. President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev signed a presidential decree on July 7; Resolution No. 638 followed on July 18 and took effect at the start of this month. Local reporting, relayed by Bitcoin Magazine, puts the transfer at 10% of mined assets, calculated after the cost of electricity and grid services — a figure the government text does not itself confirm.

How the extraction works

Qualifying miners get something concrete in return: electricity quotas at capped tariffs on ten-year contracts from listed power producers. In exchange, they hand a slice of production to the Astana Hub autonomous cluster fund, which passes the coins to the National Investment Corporation of the National Bank for management inside what the state calls its national strategic crypto reserve.

The eligibility bar is high by design. To qualify, an operator must run a data center of at least 150 megawatts, with rigs clearing 150 terahashes per second per unit. That threshold excludes the overwhelming majority of small and mid-sized miners and concentrates both the subsidized power and the state relationship among a handful of the largest players.

A royalty, not a conviction buy

The tell is in the reserve’s mandate. The National Investment Corporation can hold not just bitcoin but crypto derivatives and equity in crypto companies — a diversified state portfolio, not a sovereign bitcoin stack. The government keeps full discretion to hold, hedge, or redeploy whatever flows in. This is closer to a mining royalty collected in kind than to El Salvador’s conviction purchases or Bhutan’s hydro-mining accumulation.

That distinction is not academic. A reserve seeded by a monthly tribute has an off-switch: a future administration can revoke “strategic” designations or let the ten-year contracts lapse, and the flow stops. Coins bought and held on the balance sheet have no such lever. Kazakhstan ranks among the world’s top five mining jurisdictions, a position built on cheap coal power after China’s 2021 ban pushed miners across the border — so the volumes involved are real, but the durability of the reserve depends entirely on politics that can change.

The wider machine

The July 7 decree reaches well past mining. It establishes a Committee on Digital Assets and Payment Systems under the National Bank, mandates tokenized government securities by the end of 2026, and pushes stablecoins into cross-border trade settlement. A personal-income-tax exemption on crypto gains earned through licensed Kazakh providers runs from 2026 through 2028. Bitcoin, in this design, is one input among several into a state that wants to run the rails itself.

Why it matters: “nation-states are stacking sats” is the headline; “the state is taxing miners in kind” is the mechanism — and the two behave very differently in a crisis.

The 10% transfer rate is per local reporting relayed by Bitcoin Magazine and is not confirmed verbatim in the published government text; the 150 MW / 150 TH/s thresholds and reserve mandate are per Resolution No. 638 as reported.