In five months, one country gave a new city its own law, signed up a school of founders, and sat its central bank down with the company behind the world's largest stablecoin.

On Wednesday 7 October, Tether signed a memorandum of understanding with the National Bank of Kazakhstan and the Alatau City Authority. Tether is the company behind USDT, the largest dollar-pegged digital coin in circulation. The National Bank is the country's central bank. Alatau is a city most people have never heard of, between Almaty and Konayev, and it is the interesting part.

What the paper says is modest, so let’s keep that way. The three parties will study how other countries issue digital money, then prepare a concept and a pilot proposal for a coin pegged to the tenge. They will design a framework for putting real assets on a shared digital record (tokenization, in the trade's own word), possibly on Tether's own platform, and run a pilot inside Alatau. And Tether will help train the central bank's own staff.

No coin has been approved, no asset has been chosen, no date has been set. Paolo Ardoino, Tether's CEO, called the destination "sovereign-level financial infrastructure." The deputy governor, Binur Zhalenov, answered like a central banker: "financial stability, transaction transparency, and robust investor protection" come first.

So why write about a study?

Because of where it lands. In May 2025, President Tokayev announced a pilot zone called CryptoCity, a place where digital money could pay for ordinary things. On 8 May this year, Kazakhstan adopted a constitutional law that makes Alatau a "city of accelerated development": its own rulebook, drawing on English law, with room to experiment on digital assets. A city with permission to try what the rest of the country cannot yet.

Then the people. On 21 July, Balaji Srinivasan's Network School, a campus for founders who can work from anywhere, lost its licence in Malaysia. One day later it signed a five-year agreement with Kazakhstan's Ministry of AI and Digital Development. The first hub is planned in the Akmola region, with expansion to Alatau City written into the plan.

Three signals, pointing at one city. The money: the world's largest stablecoin company at the table. The record: a central bank studying how assets get written down. The people: a school of founders on its way.

I live in Bali, and I have seen this film start before. In August I broke down Indonesia's own plan to go on-chain and turn Bali into a financial hub. Countries are starting to compete on this.

Here is the question I cannot answer, and nobody at that table has answered it either. What happens if a government goes one step further and says: the shared digital record is the legal register?

It is not science fiction. Wyoming did a version of it in 2018, when it allowed corporations to keep their records, including the list of who owns them, on a shared digital network. I chose Wyoming for my own US company, and that way of thinking is part of why.

If a country says it for assets and for companies, a business can be born, banked and owned on the same rails. Kazakhstan has not said it. Nothing in the memorandum says it. But every piece you would need is now gathering in one place. So this could be the next move. And if they do so, they will attract thousands of founders which would attract investors hence lead to massive direct investments. That’s the playbook.

Not "which country has the lowest tax" (I mean that would be a bonus…) but which country treats the record as the law.

For four centuries a registry has been a building. In August 1602 the share book of the Dutch East India Company sat in a director's house in Amsterdam, and 1,143 people walked in to write their names. We have faster couriers now. The idea has not moved.

It is moving from both ends in the same week. Two days before Kazakhstan signed, America's derivatives regulator published its plan for rules covering digital asset markets and opened it to public comment. That is the next step after the speech I covered in the CFTC issue, and after the SEC moves I unpacked in Washington Just Wrote the Rules for Companies Born on the Internet. The largest economy is rewriting from the top. A much smaller one is building from a blank page.

This isn't new. It's just becoming possible for everyone, for everything, everywhere.

Where your company is registered is becoming a product choice, not a geography. So judge it like a product.

Ask three things of the place your company lives. Can anyone verify who owns it without calling a lawyer? Can ownership change hands without a courier and a stamp? Does the law recognise the record itself, or only the paper behind it?

You do not need to understand the technology to ask. The chain is the back end. AI will be the front end. Nobody learned how the internet works to send an email. Today the whole planet use the system and do not question the system. We are going there for digital assets.

Then watch the jurisdictions that treat the record as the law. The companies formed in the next decade will not all have a human at the desk. Software agents and machines will need a legal body, a bank account and an owner, and they will be registered wherever that takes minutes, not months.

None of this is legal or tax advice. Where to incorporate is a decision to take with counsel.

I am curious: if you were registering a company tomorrow, which country would you pick, and why? Hit reply and let me know.