ASTANA – We want to take it out of the unregulated area and make it work, because it works whether we want it or not,” National Bank Chairman Timur Suleimenov said during the plenary session Rewiring the Architecture of Finance at Astana Finance Days 2026 on Sept.
9, capturing the regulatory dilemma at the center of a financial transformation that is rapidly moving from experiment to infrastructure. The discussion brought together Astana International Financial Centre (AIFC) Governor Renat Bekturov, Freedom Holding Corp.
CEO Timur Turlov, Anchorage Digital Global Head of Stablecoin Solutions Sergio Mello and technology entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan on Sept. 9 Photo credit: AFD 2026 As blockchain, stablecoins, tokenization, programmable money and AI reshape how assets are created, moved and managed, Kazakhstan is betting that an early embrace of new financial technologiesm, combined with rules and institutional trust, can become a competitive advantage.
The discussion brought together Astana International Financial Centre (AIFC) Governor Renat Bekturov, Freedom Holding Corp. CEO Timur Turlov, Anchorage Digital Global Head of Stablecoin Solutions Sergio Mello and technology entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan, who approached that transformation from different angles, but agreed that the financial system is changing not only in how services are delivered, but also in the infrastructure underpinning them.
Suleimenov identified geopolitical fragmentation and technology as two of the forces reshaping global finance, arguing that changes in trade and investment flows are already translating into changes in financial flows. “Trade flows, the finance flows are changing fundamentally.
We’re seeing division across the Atlantic. We’re seeing division on the North American continent. We’re seeing trade wars and semi-trade wars across the world. And, of course, finance has always been a part of the debate. They always went hand-in-hand,” he said. At the same time, the emergence of blockchain and tokenized assets is challenging financial regulators to develop rules for technologies that did not exist within the traditional architecture.
“We’re still in the rule-setting phase. There is no set of rules for decentralized finance, for digital finance, crypto finance,” he said. For Kazakhstan, however, he described that uncertainty as an opportunity to establish a regulatory framework while the global market is still taking shape.
“We have adopted a very comprehensive set of rules, not only frameworks, but rules, very hands-on with how you trade cryptocurrency, how you trade stablecoins, what you do with the real world tokenized assets and things like that,” Suleimenov said The task, he added, is not to stop technologies that are already finding users, but to ensure they operate within a system that protects trust and financial stability.
“We want to take it out of the unregulated area and make it work, because it works whether we want it or not. It will be working, but I think it is to the greater good of all of us that it works in rightly regulated area,” he said.