Kazakhstan's new city of Alatau intends to digitize all buildings, real estate, goods, and services. Arman Asakayev, director of the digital economy department at the state fund Alatau City Authority, who oversees the city's development, announced this at the Central Asia Fintech Summit 2026, according to infohub.kz.
At the heart of Alatau's digital economy development project is tokenization — the conversion of rights to real assets, goods, and services into digital tokens using blockchain technology. Each such token will represent a share of a specific asset.
According to Asakayev, sensors will be placed throughout the city to record various data. Based on them, a real-time digital twin of Alatau will be created. It will allow users to see how assets exist and are managed.
"This way, we can record ownership rights to a particular asset in the city on the blockchain and then simply transfer ownership rights with that record, raise money on its basis, and then use it to build a new physical structure. Thus we launch an 'endless engine' of city construction and will be able to reach our targets of nearly 2 million residents and 1 million jobs by 2050," said Arman Asakayev, director of the digital economy department at Alatau City Authority.
Asakayev explained that a token economy will be created — a unified socio-economic space where people, companies, and government representatives can interact with each other without leaving a single system. Such blockchain-based technology will facilitate the work of AI systems that will help manage the city.
"We expect an increase in investor reach and the investor base. We are talking about exchange investors who can now enter any Alatau City project in one click and reduce ticket sizes. In infrastructure projects, the figures run into tens of millions of dollars, which, of course, is inaccessible to many investors. In the end, we will get a token economy that will allow our residents to have the most advanced technologies on the planet," noted the Alatau City Authority representative.
According to Arman Asakayev, a concept of tokenization by default has been developed. All movable and immovable property in the city, as well as other assets, services, and goods, can be tokenized in one click.
"For this, we are building our distributed digital registry that will account for ownership of everything. It will be infrastructure for tokenization without, so to speak, analog steps, which will be fully convenient and become a routine city operation," the speaker added.
It was previously reported that Alatau City Authority and two South Korean companies — AST Holdings and ILJOO GnS — signed a cooperation agreement in the field of smart cities and digital twins. The parties will next work on a pilot project that will apply these technologies in the territory of Alatau City.