On 26 February 2026 a holding company appeared on the AIFC register under BIN 260240901514. A register entry confirms one thing: the legal entity exists. It does not mean the regulator allowed anyone to sell investments under that name. As long as the Eurasian market reads those two facts as one, schemes like the one the AFSA described in its alert on Unilive Central Asia keep working: daily returns, withdrawals “at any time,” activity in digital assets, and the company is licensed for none of it.

What happened

  • The AFSA, the regulator of the AIFC, issued a public alert about Unilive Central Asia Ltd.
  • The company is on the AIFC register: BIN 260240901514, registered on 26 February 2026 as a holding company for owning and managing equity interests in group companies.
  • On 10 April 2026 it changed its name from “Unimex Exchange Central Asia Ltd.” to “Unilive Central Asia Ltd.”
  • Promotional material in the company’s name advertises promised returns, including daily returns, the ability to withdraw funds “at any time,” and activity involving digital assets.
  • The AFSA states plainly that the company is not licensed or authorised to provide financial services, including regulated activities in digital assets, and is not authorised to make financial promotions within or from the AIFC.

How we read this: the registration gap

We see a structural gap here that every scheme of this kind relies on. We will call it the registration gap: an entry on the AIFC public register confirms that a company is registered, but says nothing about its right to provide the services advertised in its name.

A BIN entry records only that the legal entity exists, here as a holding company. The right to run financial or regulated digital-asset activity is a separate authorisation, and Unilive does not hold it. The scheme gains credibility precisely because the register entry is real: a person checks the name, finds the company “in the AIFC,” and reads registration as permission.

We tried to follow that chain to the end and link the promoted online platform to the registered entity using open data. We could not. The public sites under this brand mention neither the AIFC, nor Kazakhstan, nor any registration number. That opacity is itself the risk. A user has nothing to hold on to beyond a matching name.

How to tell registration from a licence in a minute

The registration gap is tested in three steps.

  1. Find the company in the AFSA Public Register directly, not through a screenshot in a promotion or a link in a message.
  2. Read the type of entry. “Holding company,” or a plain legal-entity registration, is not a licence to provide financial services and not an authorisation for regulated digital-asset activity. They are different lines in different regimes.
  3. Check the offer against durable markers of a scheme: guaranteed or daily returns, withdrawals “at any time,” an internal token with no external exchange listing, and earnings for recruiting others. Any one of them is enough to stop, even if the name does appear on the register.

What this changes

For the region the takeaway is plain: “a company in the AIFC” stops being a mark of approval on its own. A register entry confirms registration, and it should be read that way, not as a regulator’s stamp.

The case has a second side, this time for those who genuinely register in the AIFC. A registered company’s name becomes an asset that can be hijacked. Between registration and the first public misuse of the name there is usually nothing but the time it takes someone to start using your register line as a borrowed trust signal. The centre’s registration infrastructure should not work as a loan of someone else’s reputation, and holding that line falls to both the regulator and the participants themselves.

What to watch

  • Whether new promotions appear under the Unilive name after the alert. If they do, the AFSA will have to move from a warning to concrete measures, which will show whether the regulator has tools against schemes operating outside the perimeter.
  • Whether the AFSA names the specific platforms and distribution channels. If it does, that signals a regulator willing to engage the platforms themselves, not only to warn investors.
  • The frequency of similar alerts on AIFC-registered holding companies. A rise means registration in the centre is increasingly being borrowed as someone else’s trust signal, which shifts the question from individual schemes to the registration regime itself.

The agenda is tested the moment “check the register first” turns from advice for the cautious into a market reflex. Until then the registration gap stays a working tool for anyone selling returns under someone else’s name.

Silk DeFi is a research project on crypto, DeFi, and regulation across Eurasia.

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