The numbers are difficult to dismiss. MyID now has over 14.5 million registered users and has processed more than 130 million authorisations since launch. It connects to 28 commercial banks, 17 payment systems, five marketplaces, and six government bodies. Citizens use it to open bank accounts, sign insurance contracts, apply for instalment plans, and access public services through the my.gov.uz portal, all without leaving home.
In January 2026, the government went further. A presidential resolution introduced automatic OneID registration for anyone receiving a new national ID card, bundling a free electronic digital signature into the process. As of February 2026, every new ID card issued in Uzbekistan automatically enrols its holder in the digital identity ecosystem. The European Digital Identity Wallet, by contrast, remains in pilot phase across a handful of member states, with full rollout still subject to negotiation.
Kazakhstan's eGov Push: 54 Million Services and Counting
Across the border, Kazakhstan declared 2026 its official Year of Digitalisation and Artificial Intelligence, with President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev signing the decree on 06/01/2026. The ambition is sweeping: at least 50 government services powered by AI, 80 per cent of civil servants using digital workstations, and 99 per cent high-speed internet coverage nationwide.
Kazakhstan's eGov Mobile app already delivered 54 million public services in 2025. The 2026 roadmap includes AI-powered service enhancements, three new data centres with 12.9 megawatts of capacity, and high-speed internet expansion to 1,900 additional rural communities. The country's Alem.ai centre in Astana houses a supercomputing cluster built on NVIDIA H200 chips that ranked 86th globally on the TOP500 list.
Citizens file tax documents through a mobile app, access emergency alerts through the Aitu messenger, and increasingly interact with government services through AI agents that speak Kazakh, Russian, and English. The domestic messenger Aitu has been mandated for all government agencies, quasi-public organisations, and the armed forces for official communications, a move framed as digital sovereignty but one that also consolidates state control over a single communications channel.
What This Should Mean for European Policymakers
The European angle here is not simply admiration. It is a policy stress test. The EU's eIDAS 2.0 framework, which underpins the forthcoming Digital Identity Wallet, has been designed with exactly the kind of data protection and interoperability safeguards that Central Asia has so far skipped. The question is whether Europe's caution is wisdom or paralysis.
Kai Zenner, head of office and digital policy adviser to MEP Axel Voss and one of the European Parliament's most closely watched voices on digital identity, has consistently argued that trust infrastructure is the foundation on which any biometric public service must be built. Without it, speed is simply risk transferred onto citizens. That argument looks prescient when set against Uzbekistan's mandatory biometric SIM registration, which creates a near-complete digital identity trail for every mobile user; a system designed to prevent fraud that privacy advocates warn could just as easily enable surveillance.
Equally relevant is the work coming out of the Alan Turing Institute in London, where researchers have been modelling the differential privacy risks of centralised biometric databases. Their findings are unambiguous: biometric data, once compromised, cannot be reset like a password. A government that controls both the bureaucracy and the biometric database holds leverage that no data breach notification law can fully remedy.
The risks that Central Asian deployments expose are not hypothetical for Europe. They are live design questions:
- Both Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan lack comprehensive data protection legislation comparable to the UK GDPR or the EU GDPR.
- Biometric data, once leaked or misappropriated, is permanently compromised.
- Government-mandated apps create single points of failure and potential censorship chokepoints.
- Rural and lower-income populations risk exclusion when public services move exclusively to digital-first channels.
- The line between digital convenience and digital control is thinner than any press release admits.
The Comparison Table Europe Should Be Studying
Set against European benchmarks, the contrast is instructive. Uzbekistan's MyID rivals the functionality of Spain's Cl@ve system or Estonia's e-identity infrastructure, arguably the EU's gold standard, yet it has been deployed to a population of 36 million in a fraction of the time Estonia spent building its framework. Kazakhstan's eGov platform, with 54 million transactions in a single year across a population of 19 million, dwarfs per-capita digital service uptake in several EU member states.
Estonia built its system on a decade of legal and technical groundwork. Uzbekistan built its system on speed and presidential decree. Both approaches have delivered working technology. Only one has built the accountability layer underneath it.
Where the Race Goes Next
The competition between Tashkent and Astana is itself a useful signal. When Kazakhstan launches Alem.ai, Uzbekistan responds with expanded MyID integration. When Uzbekistan mandates biometric SIM cards, Kazakhstan pushes Aitu adoption across the public sector. Citizens of both countries benefit from this dynamic, provided the safeguards keep pace with the ambition. At present, they do not.
For European observers, the lesson is double-edged. Deployment speed matters; Europe's multi-year pilot cycles cost real citizens real convenience. But regulatory architecture is not bureaucratic overhead; it is the difference between a public service and a surveillance instrument. The EU AI Act, the Digital Identity Wallet framework, and the UK's forthcoming digital identity trust framework are not obstacles to the kind of transformation Central Asia is pursuing. They are the conditions under which that transformation can be trusted.
Eighty million Central Asian citizens are already living the experiment. European policymakers have the rare advantage of watching it unfold before committing their own populations. That window will not stay open indefinitely.
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