Monetary sovereignty and dual extraction: platform capitalism, CBDC, and the new financial extractivism in Kazakhstan

Kazakhstan’s political economy has long been shaped by extractivism, foreign ownership, and the persistent leakage of domestic surplus through external financial channels. While this dynamic has historically operated through the oil sector, this paper argues that a new form of extraction is emerging in the financial sphere via the rise of Kaspi, a dominant fintech platform that increasingly controls payments, credit intermediation, and data infrastructure. Drawing on post Keynesian monetary theory, we analyze how Kaspi’s platform-based ecosystem weakens traditional monetary transmission mechanisms by displacing institutional banking channels and insulating financial activity from central bank influence. Within an endogenous money framework, we conceptualize this process as a form of digital financial disintermediation that erodes monetary sovereignty and amplifies private rent extraction, particularly in an economy already characterized by external dependence. Against this backdrop, we examine Kazakhstan’s planned Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), the Digital Tenge, as an institutional development with broader political-economic implications, rather than only a payment innovation. In particular, we explore whether CBDC could provide an additional public infrastructure capable of mitigating some of the risks associated with what we term a dual extraction regime: the historically entrenched outflow of oil rents through foreign-owned energy consortia and the potential externalization of digital rents through platform finance. We contend that a well-designed CBDC can restore central bank authority over payment systems, re-anchor monetary transmission, and create the institutional conditions for directing credit toward green investment and productive diversification in an economy whose developmental trajectory has long been constrained by hydrocarbon dependence.