If you are a private individual in Kazakhstan with no sole-trader registration and no company, there is no lawful way under the current Law on Digital Assets to run a mining rig at home. The law recognises only two kinds of "digital miner": an individual entrepreneur (ИП) and a Kazakh legal entity. Mining needs a licence, has to go through an accredited mining pool and has to take place in a data centre. And for the first type of licence, that data centre must sit outside residential areas.
So mining itself is not banned. It is a licensed business, and the real questions are whether you are someone who can hold the licence and whether your machines are somewhere that can be licensed. The sections below go through the law in that order: who qualifies, what each licence subtype demands, what happens when you host rigs at someone else's farm, whether the old forced-sale rule still applies, how mined coins can be sold, and where cloud mining falls in the text (mostly, it doesn't).
Who the law allows to mine
The governing act is Law No. 193-VII of 6 February 2023, "On Digital Assets in the Republic of Kazakhstan" (О цифровых активах в Республике Казахстан). We checked the version in force from 1 May 2026, as amended by Law No. 259-VIII of 16 January 2026.
Article 1(7) defines a digital miner as "an individual entrepreneur or a legal entity of the Republic of Kazakhstan". Article 8 repeats the point: mining is permitted to individual entrepreneurs and Kazakh legal entities. Nowhere does the law make room for a person acting without any business registration.
Article 8 also fixes the form mining has to take. The miner works through a digital mining pool, uses a digital mining data centre, and operates under a licence. Take away any one of the three and it is not mining as the law understands it. Nor can just any website act as the pool: Article 1(10) defines a mining pool as a legal entity accredited under Kazakh digital-asset legislation, and Article 10 requires the pool's hardware and software to be physically located in Kazakhstan, with passed information-security tests on file.
Put simply, whether you are a Kazakh citizen or a foreigner, lawful mining starts with registering as a sole trader or setting up a company (a ТОО, for example) and then applying for a licence. What a foreigner needs in order to register as a sole trader is something we have not checked; residence permits and IIN questions are covered in the guide for foreigners.
The two mining licence subtypes, and why a flat qualifies for neither
Under Article 9, a digital mining licence is issued for three years and comes in two subtypes. The detailed conditions are in the Rules for Licensing Digital Mining Activity, approved by Order No. 169/НҚ of the Ministry of Digital Development on 28 April 2023 and last amended by Order No. 276/НҚ of 2 June 2026.
Subtype I is for a miner with its own data centre, held either in ownership or on another lawful basis such as a lease. Several of the qualification requirements rule out home mining on their own:
- the data centre must be located outside residential areas;
- where the connection comes from a substation of 35 kV or above, the permitted capacity must be at least one megawatt;
- the applicant must provide documents on commercial electricity metering, emergency load-shedding equipment and telecoms systems.
Subtype II is for a miner that owns the hardware but has no data centre and places its machines in someone else's. The application must include a letter of intent to cooperate with a holder of a Subtype I licence, and, where the miner belongs to a pool, proof of that too.
Suppose you keep two rigs in an apartment in Almaty. The apartment is in a residential area, so Subtype I is out. The rigs are not in any licensed data centre, so Subtype II does not fit either. Even if you are already registered as a sole trader, those two machines cannot be mined lawfully where they stand.
Applications go through the e-government portals egov.kz and elicense.kz and require an electronic digital signature (ЭЦП). The rules set an overall time limit of 15 working days: 2 working days after registration to check the file is complete, then 13 to check the qualification requirements. The licensing authority is designated by government decree; it is currently the Committee for Digital Assets and Breakthrough Technologies under the Ministry of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development. The authority can suspend a licence for one to six months, while Article 9 reserves revocation to a court.
We did not check the licence fee. The e-licensing portal shows fees expressed in monthly calculation indices (МРП), but a new Tax Code has applied since 2026. Confirm the current amount on the licence page at elicense.kz or with an accountant rather than budgeting from figures in older articles.
Hosting your rigs at a Kazakh mining farm: do you need your own licence?
A common arrangement is to buy machines abroad or online, pay a hosting fee, and have a farm in Kazakhstan run them while you collect the coins.
Under the licensing rules, "owns the hardware, keeps it in someone else's data centre" is exactly the situation Subtype II describes. In the law's eyes, the owner of the machine is the miner and the farm is the party supplying the data centre. A farm holding a Subtype I licence does not make every hosted machine's owner legal by extension. Either the owner is itself a sole trader or company with a Subtype II licence, or the law does not let that owner mine with those machines at all.
If someone offers you hosting, ask two things: what the farm's Subtype I licence number is, and under which entity and licence you, as the machine owner, will be connected. If the answer is "you don't need one, we handle all of that", ask whose name it is handled in. We did not find an official public search for mining licence holders by number, so this cannot be checked independently; the most you can do is ask to see the licence itself or its electronic record.
Is the "sell 75% through an exchange" rule still in force?
No. The 2023 version of Article 8 contained a clause requiring that, when coins mined in Kazakhstan were sold, at least 75% had to go through digital asset exchanges licensed in the Astana International Financial Centre (AIFC), with a transitional 50% share during 2024. Law No. 231-VIII of 17 November 2025 removed that clause, and in the version effective 1 May 2026, Article 8(4) is marked as no longer in force.
Search results on mining in Kazakhstan are still dominated by news from the 2021–2022 crackdown on farms and by summaries of the 2023 text. If a piece quotes a mandatory sale percentage, check what year it was written.
Dropping the forced sale does not mean mining has been deregulated. Article 4 of the same law empowers the authority in charge of electricity to set requirements for connecting miners to the grid and to approve how mining electricity quotas are determined, so power has always been regulated separately. Separate Rules on strategic digital mining were approved by a government decree of 18 July 2026; we have not read that text line by line and do not cover it here.
Who owns mined coins, and where they can be sold
Article 8 is plain on ownership: unsecured digital assets produced by digital mining belong to the digital miner. When a pool divides coins among its miners according to their hashrate, Article 10 says that distribution is not "organising the circulation of digital assets".
Selling is a separate matter. Since May 2026, organising the circulation of digital assets in Kazakhstan requires the relevant authorisation: platforms inside the AIFC are licensed by AFSA, and those outside it by the National Bank. A licensed miner converting coins to tenge should use those licensed platforms. What it should not do is sell quietly to an unlicensed buyer offering a "good rate", or set itself up to exchange currency for other people on a regular basis; the latter can cross the line into unlicensed activity, which the unlicensed P2P guide covers in detail. To check whether a platform holds a licence, start with the AFSA register lookup and then go through the four columns described in how to read the AFSA register.
Licensed miners also pay a dedicated tax on mining, which applies at sole-trader and company level; we did not check its rates under the new Tax Code. For how an individual reports gains from selling coins, see crypto tax in Kazakhstan.
Cloud mining and foreign pools: a gap in the text
One question the law does not answer directly: you live in Kazakhstan, buy a "cloud mining" contract from a foreign company or rent hashrate in another country's data centre, and receive a trickle of coins into your wallet each day. Is that mining in Kazakhstan?
We found nothing in the Law on Digital Assets or the licensing rules addressing that case. The mining the law regulates is computation carried out in Kazakhstan, in a data centre, through an accredited pool; with the hardware abroad, it is hard to fit the arrangement into that wording. But silence in the text is evidence of neither permission nor prohibition. We also found no clear rule on how the coins received are treated as income for tax purposes.
One thing is certain: the counterparty to such a contract is abroad, and Kazakh regulators have no reach over it if something goes wrong. Treat cloud mining that advertises "guaranteed principal" or a "fixed daily return" as a possible scam until proven otherwise; the usual ways licensed status is faked are set out in the guide to fake AFSA-licensed channels. For your own situation, take the contract to a local lawyer.
Questions
I only mine a little on a home PC graphics card. Is even that illegal?
The law sets no size threshold. Article 1 defines digital mining as using computing power to confirm blockchain data blocks according to encryption algorithms, without any minimum hashrate. Only licensed sole traders and legal entities may do it, and only in a data centre. Small volume does not change how the activity is classified; it only changes how likely it is to be noticed. We did not verify the fines or the administrative or criminal provisions that would apply.
I am already registered as a sole trader. Can I mine at home now?
No. Registering as a sole trader settles only who may hold the licence. Subtype I requires a data centre outside residential areas, and Subtype II requires the machines to be in someone else's data centre with a letter of intent from a Subtype I licence holder. A home meets neither. After registering, you still have to apply for a licence under one of the two subtypes.
What this guide is based on
All pages were opened and checked in October 2026. The official legal database Әділет (adilet.zan.kz) loads the text of acts through page scripts, and we did not compare the articles there one by one; the law and the ministry order were checked against the compilations on cdb.kz and zakon.uchet.kz, with the version dates noted. The official text is the one on Әділет.
- О цифровых активах в Республике Казахстан Law No. 193-VII of 2023, cdb.kz compilation, version dated 2026-05-01Definitions in Article 1(7), (8) and (10); Article 8 on miners being limited to sole traders and legal entities, working through pools and data centres under licence, owning what they mine, and the former forced-sale clause repealed by Law No. 231-VIII; Article 9 on the two subtypes, three-year term, suspension and court revocation; Article 10 on pool accreditation and distribution; Article 4 on the electricity authority's powers.
- Правила лицензирования деятельности по цифровому майнингу Ministry of Digital Development Order No. 169/НҚ of 2023, as amended by Order No. 276/НҚ of 2026, zakon.uchet.kz compilationQualification requirements for both subtypes (outside residential areas, one megawatt, letter of intent); applying via egov.kz and elicense.kz with an ЭЦП; the 15-working-day time limit.
- Об определении лицензиара по осуществлению лицензирования деятельности по цифровому майнингу Government decree, ӘділетDesignates the Committee for Digital Assets and Breakthrough Technologies as the mining licensing authority.