8th November 2025 > > Kazakhstan & privacy coins.

tl;dr

Kazakhstan is on the verge of making a very, very wise decision. Privacy coins take the limelight, but I refuse to get involved.

Market Snap

Market Wrap

You had two opportunities yesterday to buy BTC for five figures. I know how sensible all you chaps and chapesses are, so I think I can safely assume you were all furiously buying at under $100k. Personally, I added more COIN and MSTR into the mix – you really should take advantage of your ISA as much as you can before Thieves Reeves casts envious looks at all those lovely CGT free gains accruing to crypto stock investors.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – Kazakhstan

Berik Sholpankulov, Deputy Chairman of the National Bank, made this announcement to Kazakhstan’s parliament:

“We are considering the possibility of using part of the National Fund’s assets and gold and foreign exchange reserves for investment in crypto assets.”

It has been a while since we have seen enthusiasm for a BTC strategic reserve at a sovereign level, so Berik’s intervention is much appreciated.

I don’t know much about Kazakhstan, though I read that the authorities there have shut down 130 illegal cryptocurrency exchanges that may have been used as a conduit for laundering dirty money. I can’t find an estimate of how much was laundered, though you can be sure it is far less than the amounts moving around in the form of the EUR 500 note. Nonetheless, this crackdown is also very welcome.

In comparison to the UK, Kazakhstan’s estimated GDP for 2025 is just $300bn whereas the UK is projected to reach $4 TRILLION, thirteen times greater. Why is that Kazakhstan’s gold reserves sit at $40bn and the UK’s is only two and a half times larger at $100bn? I do wonder how that has happened, but clearly the Kazakhstanis are smarter than us. With gold at all-time highs, it would have been mightily useful for the UK to have gold reserves commensurate with the size of our economy, but I guess that opportunity has now passed us by.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – Privacy coins

In contrast to the broader market, privacy coins have been on a tear of late:

ZEC (Zcash) – up 76% on the week.

XMR (Monero) – up 10% on the week.

DASH (Dash) – up 130% on the week.

ZKSync (ZKSync) – up 113% on the week.

DCR (Decred) – up 90% on the week.

Privacy coins aim to do what they say – to keep your transactions private. Traditional blockchains show in detail the movement of all coins, the amount, the sending wallet, and the receiving wallet. This information is (mostly) hidden when using a privacy coin.

Obviously, there are legitimate reasons for using privacy coins, and illegitimate ones. I am reliably informed by a third party that various websites on the darknet specialising in the provision of banned narcotics usually offer the facility to use one or more of these privacy coins.

Many years ago, I owned a small amount of XMR and ZEC, for investment purposes only. I took what I still think is the sensible decision to cut quickly and not get involved again. I think if you put on your annual tax return (soon to be quarterly under the Making Tax Difficult programme instigated by HMRC) that you have gains or losses from privacy coins, that is going to raise some eyebrows amongst the pen-pushers.

Your crypto tax return is going to be very complicated, with plenty of scope for genuine, inadvertent errors. The last thing you really want is to attract the attention of HMRC by investing in privacy coins, in my opinion.