Bitcoin Magazine
Kazakhstan Moves to Build a National Crypto Reserve Funded by Bitcoin Miners
Kazakhstan has laid out a plan to build a national strategic crypto reserve fed by its bitcoin miners, part of a two-step push by President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev to pull the country’s large mining industry into a regulated, state-supervised system.
A presidential decree signed July 7 sets the frame, and a government resolution approved July 18 supplies the mechanism. The government cleared the rules for strategic digital mining under Government Resolution No. 638, published in the PRG.kz legal database.
Together the two measures aim to route mining output and crypto trading through Kazakh infrastructure, with the state taking a share of mined coins for a sovereign reserve.
The reserve sits at the center. Under the July 18 resolution, the Kazakhstan government created a program of “strategic digital mining,” in which miners receive electricity quotas at capped tariffs on 10-year contracts from listed power producers. In exchange, they must hand over part of what they mine, according to local reporting.
A formula sets the transfer at 10% of mined digital assets after the cost of electricity and grid services, paid each month to the state-linked Astana Hub fund, which passes the coins to the National Investment Corporation of the National Bank for management inside a “national strategic crypto reserve.”
The first approved power source is the Ekibastuz GRES-1 coal plant, with a 300-megawatt quota. To qualify, a miner must run a data center of at least 150 megawatts, with rigs that each clear 150 terahashes per second, among other conditions.
The resolution defines its reserve as a vehicle to invest in digital assets, in derivatives tied to those assets, and in the shares of companies that build or invest in crypto.
Rather than hold coins alone, the structure gives the state a spread of exposure to the sector it now seeks to grow, with the National Bank’s investment arm at the controls.
The design turns Kazakhstan’s cheap power and mining base into a channel for state accumulation, an approach that echoes the reserve strategies spreading among governments. Kazakhstan had floated a $1 billion crypto reserve built in part on seized assets and state-mined coins, and its central bank moved to invest up to $350 million in crypto-linked funds.
The United States established a strategic bitcoin reserve from forfeited coins last year, a model other states have weighed.
NEW:
— Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) July 23, 2026Kazakhstan approves "the implementation of strategic digital [asset] mining" and a national reserve
pic.twitter.com/go0HT2Nhl6
Kazakhstan ranks among the world’s largest bitcoin mining hubs, fifth by mining activity in the Cambridge Digital Mining Industry Report from April 2025, a status built on cheap coal power that drew miners after China’s 2021 ban, though the country moved to tighten its mining rules over grid strain.
The new program reads as an attempt to harness that base rather than curb it, and the decree directs the Kazakhstan government to tap associated petroleum gas, natural gas, and renewable output for mining.
The July 7 decree reaches past mining. It sets up a Committee on Digital Assets and Payment Systems under the National Bank, and orders work on tokenization platforms, exchange and custody services, and crypto-fiat channels tied to the financial system.
It calls for stablecoins to settle cross-border trade for export and import, tokenized government securities by the end of 2026, and rules that isolate customer assets from a bankrupt provider’s estate.
To pull activity onshore, the decree offers a plan to exempt individuals from personal income tax on crypto gains earned through Kazakh providers from the start of 2026 through the end of 2028, plus a window for holders to disclose coins acquired or mined in the past if they move them into regulated infrastructure.
The government also plans a National Cryptocurrency Analysis Center by mid-2027 to track transactions and flag illicit schemes, along with a review of DeFi platforms.
This post Kazakhstan Moves to Build a National Crypto Reserve Funded by Bitcoin Miners first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.
© Secretary of the Air Force Publi/Tech. Sgt. Michael Campbell
Bitcoin Magazine
Fed Chair Warsh: No Bailout for Crypto Industry in Crisis
Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh told the House Financial Services Committee on July 14 that the central bank will decline to rescue the cryptocurrency industry in a crisis, a message he delivered during his first semiannual monetary policy testimony as chair.
The exchange came from Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA), a longtime crypto skeptic, who asked whether the Fed would backstop failing digital-asset firms the way it supported money market funds in 2008. Warsh rejected the premise. “We do not want to be in the bailout business, full stop,” he said. He added, “We want to be in a position where we’re not bailing out anybody, including crypto.”
Warsh, who took office May 15 and presided over his first FOMC meeting in June, framed the stance through his own history.
As a Fed governor under Chairman Ben Bernanke, he helped design the 2008 rescue effort. “I still have the scars from the 2008 financial crisis,” he said. “That is not something we want to repeat.” He argued that the post-crisis bailouts bred moral hazard, and he wants to spare digital assets the same fate.
For a market that spent years seeking legitimacy alongside traditional finance, the comments draw a hard line. Warsh, described as the first crypto-native Fed chair, has treated Bitcoin as a gauge rather than a ward of the state. During his nomination hearing he called Bitcoin “not a substitute for the U.S. dollar,” and he has used its price as a thermometer for whether monetary policy sits in the right place.
The warning lands days before a pivotal deadline. Rules to implement the GENIUS Act, the stablecoin law enacted in 2025, are due Saturday, and Warsh confirmed the Fed is “racing” to publish its proposals on time.
The statute pays stablecoin holders ahead of other creditors when an issuer fails and requires full reserves behind each coin. With the stablecoin market near $310 billion, Sherman pressed the point that a run on one issuer could spread across the sector.
Warsh declined to offer an absolute pledge. He told lawmakers the Fed would act to limit “extraordinary” risks over the next four years, language that leaves room for intervention in a systemic event. American Banker noted that he declined to rule out any future step-in.
At the Senate Banking Committee the following day, Warsh urged banking regulators to coordinate on GENIUS Act rulemaking to prevent regulatory arbitrage, a race that lets firms hunt for the lightest oversight.
He paired that call with a defense of Fed independence on monetary policy and a pledge to shrink a balance sheet that sits near $6.7 trillion.
The takeaway for crypto is a market-discipline era: the Fed will set the rules of the road, yet firms that overreach will bear the cost of their own failures. For an industry that courted federal backing, Warsh’s message asks it to stand on its own.
This post Fed Chair Warsh: No Bailout for Crypto Industry in Crisis first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.
Which is worse, sailing your superyacht through the city where your company just made mass job cuts, or getting named to a U.S. Federal Reserve panel on jobs and productivity three days after announcing thousands of layoffs?
It might not be a full Zuck, but Microsoft Xbox CEO Asha Sharma is getting lots of attention, and not in a good way, for the latter this week.
Sharma was named Thursday to co-lead a new Federal Reserve “Productivity and Jobs” task force, charged with assessing the economic impact of AI and other new technologies on the labor market. Her co-leaders: Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist and vocal AI booster, and Stanford economist Charles I. Jones, who is currently on leave at Anthropic, maker of the Claude AI chatbot.
The gaming press, as you can imagine, is having a field day. The headline from Kotaku sums it up: “Xbox CEO Will Advise Federal Reserve On Jobs After Mass Layoffs.”
PC Gamer, for its part, noted that the task force is supposed to represent a “commitment to price stability and maximum employment.” However, that’s the Fed’s broad mandate, as described by Chairman Kevin Warsh. It’s actually not the specific mission of the Productivity and Jobs task force, which is narrower: assessing what AI and other new technologies are doing to the economy.
In a separate sign of the backlash, Microsoft communications chief Frank Shaw took to X on Friday to knock down claims that the Xbox cuts were made to replace employees with foreign workers, calling it “bad information” and noting that the H-1B visa figures being cited are company-wide renewals, not Xbox-specific. He also pointed out that Sharma is “an American born, raised, and educated CEO, from Wisconsin.”
Also lost in the coverage of the Fed appointment is the fact that Sharma is less than five months into the job, having taken over as Xbox CEO in February with a mandate to turn around and preserve a gaming division that spent more than $20 billion over five years while its core revenue shrank. The restructuring announced this week is a key part of that effort.
What’s more, it’s hard to imagine that this is the timing Microsoft or Sharma wanted. Announcements like this are often outside the control of the participants. The Federal Reserve sets its own schedule.
Still, it’s tough timing for an executive who announced plans this week to cut 3,200 gaming jobs — about 1,600 immediately, with the rest over the coming year — amounting to roughly 20% of Xbox’s workforce. Sharma herself called it the most significant restructuring in the division’s history.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s superyacht Launchpad, for the record, is currently cruising the waters off Juneau, Alaska, a full 900 miles from Seattle.
Bitcoin Magazine
U.S. Bitcoin Reserve Stalls as Treasury and Commerce Vie for Control: Report
Sixteen months after President Donald Trump ordered his administration to build a federal bitcoin reserve, the White House says it is still working out how the fund should be structured, and a dispute between two departments has slowed the effort, according to recent reporting from Bloomberg.
Trump signed an executive order in March 2025 to create what he called a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, along with a separate U.S. Digital Asset Stockpile for other cryptocurrencies.
The order directed the Treasury and Commerce departments to develop budget-neutral methods for acquiring bitcoin, ones that would not draw on taxpayer money.
The reserve was to be funded in large part with bitcoin the government already holds through criminal and civil forfeitures.
According to Bloomberg, the plan has run into two obstacles. Treasury and Commerce are each making a case to run the reserve, and questions have arisen over whether Treasury has the legal authority to manage the holdings.
People familiar with the matter, who were not authorized to speak in public, said housing the reserve inside the Commerce Department is one option under review.
The Justice Department said its Office of Legal Counsel “is working closely with both the Treasury and Commerce departments to determine legally available options to accomplish the president’s policy.”
A further concern is whether the government can hold bitcoin for an indefinite period, as the order intended, given the currency’s price swings.
“President Trump campaigned on a vision of cementing America as the global capital of cryptocurrency and other cutting-edge technologies,” White House spokesperson Liz Huston said in a statement. “To deliver on the president’s vision, the Trump administration continues to evaluate the best structure for a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and U.S. Digital Asset Stockpile.”
The administration’s chief crypto adviser, Patrick Witt, said in April that he expected a major announcement within weeks. That announcement has not come.
Officials have said a presidential order alone cannot complete the project. The order does not carry the force of law, and Congress has not passed legislation to authorize the reserve.
Yesterday, while speaking on the newly introduced Trump Accounts, President Trump said bitcoin could eventually be added to the accounts, saying “something could happen” when asked about the asset. Trump also said he’s “a big fan of crypto.”
BREAKING:
— Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) July 6, 2026President Trump says "a lot of people" are using Bitcoin
"I don't think anybody realizes how powerful (it is)"pic.twitter.com/CkVrvHUE3q
A bill from Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., and Rep. Nick Begich, R-Alaska, would codify the order and set a target of acquiring 1 million bitcoin over five years through budget-neutral strategies. No such measure has advanced. If Republicans lose their House majority in this year’s midterm elections, the prospect of passage could dim.
The government’s bitcoin position ranks among the largest in the world. Estimates put it above 300,000 coins, worth more than $20 billion at current prices, according to Arkham Intelligence. The White House has said premature sales of seized bitcoin cost taxpayers about $17 billion over the years, and that a single reserve holding the asset for the long term would give the country a strategic advantage.
Timing has also worked against the plan as an investment. Bitcoin reached a record in October, a rally the administration tied in part to enthusiasm about Trump, then fell close to 50% from that peak. When Trump first called for the reserve, bitcoin traded near $93,000; it now sits above $64,000, a drop of about a third.
While the structure remains unresolved, Trump has built a personal bitcoin position of more than $50 million, according to his recent financial disclosure.
The reserve, described by the administration as strategic, differs from a conventional strategic reserve because it is meant to be held for the long term rather than tapped during market emergencies.
This post U.S. Bitcoin Reserve Stalls as Treasury and Commerce Vie for Control: Report first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.
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