Kazakhstan court orders curbs on Coinbase, BingX and four others

The AIFC is Kazakhstan's ring-fenced financial zone in Astana, built in 2018 with its own English-common-law court and its own regulator, AFSA, to lure fintech and crypto firms with a bespoke licensing regime rather than Kazakhstan's national rules. That split jurisdiction is why six platforms, including Coinbase and HTX (already under UK and EU sanctions), ended up in an AIFC court rather than a national one, and why nine other exchanges chose to pull access voluntarily once AFSA began its claims.

Users inside the AIFC lose direct access to Coinbase, BingX, HTX, Bitcoin.com, BitMart and WEEX once Apple and Google act on the injunctions, forcing them toward AIFC-licensed alternatives or peer channels outside the zone. The nine platforms that restricted access on their own avoided litigation and keep smoother standing with AFSA, while the six named firms now carry a formal unlicensed-activity finding that can follow them into other jurisdictions' due-diligence checks.

Routing enforcement through Apple and Google turns app-store gatekeeping into a compliance tool, since the court itself declined to bind the store operators directly and left AFSA to serve them after the fact. That is a narrower, geographically confined order than a nationwide ban, but it still tests whether a special economic zone can compel global platforms to geo-block through private intermediaries rather than through the state's own network controls, a precedent other regulators will watch closely.

The outcome now hinges on whether Apple and Google actually implement the geo-blocking AFSA says it will serve on them, following the Sept. 15 judgment AFSA disclosed in its October announcement. Compliance would confirm app stores as an enforcement chokepoint for offshore financial zones; resistance or delay would leave AFSA's injunction largely symbolic inside the AIFC, and would test whether Kazakhstan's carve-out jurisdiction has any real reach over platforms that never sought its license.