Kazakhstan's AFSA to Serve Apple and Google With Injunctions Against HTX and 5 Others

Six Platforms, One Court Order

Kazakhstan's Astana Financial Services Authority (AFSA) said on Tuesday it will hand Apple and Google the injunctions its court has issued against six unlicensed crypto platforms, among them HTX, Coinbase, BingX, Bitcoin.com, BitMart and WEEX. The orders came from the Astana International Financial Centre (AIFC) Court, and the regulator announced the injunctions on Oct. 20, publishing the notice on its own site. Each order stops its operator from offering, marketing or providing digital asset services inside the AIFC, or to users located there, without a license, and from shipping mobile apps meant for that purpose. AFSA CEO Evgeniya Bogdanova said the court orders will go to the companies behind Google Play and the Apple App Store so they can restrict access to the services; the regulator did not confirm whether those notices have been delivered. The step closes a process that began long before this week. Bogdanova said AFSA warned more than 20 platforms during 2025 and took its cases to court in early 2026 after some operators kept serving users without permission. Nine platforms then restricted access to their apps in Kazakhstan on their own initiative, which led the regulator to drop its cases against them; the court record puts the number of dropped operators at 12. Seven others have told AFSA they intend to apply for a license. The action spans companies of very different sizes across the Web3 industry, and it is a legal event rather than a market one, since the HTX price is not at issue anywhere in the court's order. The AIFC is a defined financial zone, and AFSA both authorizes and supervises the firms inside it. The regulator's stated concern is unfair competition against licensed firms, plus the client asset, disclosure and dispute-resolution protections unlicensed platforms do not provide.

Apple and Google Drawn Into the Order

The legal foundation is a default judgment the AIFC Court entered on Sept. 15 in Case No. 10 of 2026, after the platform operators filed neither an acknowledgment of service nor a defense. A variation order dated Sept. 18 removed a seventh name, LBank, whose operator had blocked access to its service in Kazakhstan, trimming the covered list to six; AFSA said the platform took that step to address the regulator's concerns. Under the orders, Apple and Google become bound once they are served with notice, and each may apply to vary or set the injunctions aside after acknowledging service. Justice Sir Stephen Richards declined, for now, to grant AFSA's separate request for a direct order against the two companies, writing that the “sensible course in the first instance” is for the claimant to open a dialogue with Google LLC and Apple Inc. He also confined the injunctions to the AIFC rather than the whole country, citing amendments to the digital assets law effective May 1 that handed the National Bank of Kazakhstan the broader nationwide licensing role. The judge left AFSA free to return to court later if that dialogue fails. The app store route matters because distribution is where retail reach lives: many users in Kazakhstan meet these platforms through a phone, whether the aim is spot trading or simply to buy crypto with Apple Pay and fund a first account, so restricting store listings reaches further than a website block. The order stops short of compelling the stores outright, but service of the notice changes their position at once. Any removal or geographic restriction of an app will follow whatever process the regulator now opens with the two companies, and until that runs, the apps stay in the stores.

After Service, the Stores Decide

Enforcement runs on two tracks: the court orders set the legal bar, and the app stores are the lever. The default judgment imposes the prohibition without a contested hearing, so the operators' first real chance to push back comes only after service. The Sept. 18 variation order is the tell: LBank left the list within days of cutting access, evidence that voluntary withdrawal settles these cases faster than litigation. For HTX, exposure is bounded by the AIFC's special regulatory zone rather than the whole country; questions from Coinbase tax reporting to app availability now sit with the companies. Whether HTX follows the seven platforms planning to apply for a license is the next checkpoint. The ruling says nothing about market levels, which our HTX technical analysis page tracks; on the token side, the HTX DAO burn of 9.39 trillion HTX tokens in Q3 tightened circulating supply as a separate tokenomics lever.