President of Kazakhstan Kassym-Jomart Tokayev signed a law providing for the introduction of an additional tax on electricity for miners working in the country. The law will come into force in January 2022.
Due to the ban on mining in China, a large number of Chinese miners have been moving to Kazakhstan in recent months. Kazakhstan has previously been one of the main directions for the extraction of bitcoin. According to the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index (CBECI), the country is the leader in terms of total network hashrate after the United States and Russia.
Now, after the introduction of harsh measures against miners by the Chinese authorities, mining farms are starting to move their equipment to Kazakhstan. So, last month, the BTC.com pool moved all its ASIC miners from China to Kazakhstan, and the manufacturer of mining equipment Canaan Creative plans to launch the first bitcoin mining farm in Kazakhstan.
Given the current situation, the country’s president signed a law according to which cryptocurrency miners will pay an additional fee of 1 Kazakhstani tenge ($ 0.00233) per kWh.
The bill was adopted by the Parliament of Kazakhstan in mid-June. Chairman of the Committee for Economic Reforms and Regional Development Albert Rau said that the main purpose of the new legislation is to properly control the mining industry and “bring it out of the shadows.”
Previously, Rau served as Vice Minister for Investment and Development of Kazakhstan. According to local media reports, it was Rau who became the author of the new legislative initiative. After the law comes into force, the country will lose its attractiveness for miners, which will force them to move to other jurisdictions.
According to last year’s Bloomberg data, Sweden and Norway are once again lucrative mining countries thanks to their low electricity costs. Canada can also become an alternative to China and Kazakhstan.
