Real Life Business Cases for the Digital Tenge

The National Bank of Kazakhstan has taken to LinkedIn to report progress on the Digital Tenge and to state that it is open to collaboration on CBDCs, programmable payments and what it refers to as GovTech.¹ The Digital Tenge is already live, and it is providing a working programmable finance system that’s already part of the country’s financial infrastructure.

Interestingly, the main challenge has not been the underlying technology, R3 Corda, but finding a real product-market fit. Programmable public finance has allowed government funds to be moved automatically when certain conditions are met.

Public money follows transparent rules, not manual instructions. For government projects, every payment from the responsible ministry to the contractors and then from the contractors to the suppliers is automatically verified. Criteria must be met: the supplier must be licensed and verified, the price and volume must match approved parameters, and the payments must fit the project plan. If something doesn’t match, the transaction simply doesn’t go through.