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Tulpar (app)

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A white winged horse leaping left on a turquoise rounded square, beside the word tulpar in dark teal lowercase letters
Tulpar logo

Tulpar (Iradi: Tulpar) is a messaging app founded in Talas in 2019 by the commentator Jason Ilyasov, who is its chief executive and public face. It began as a free chat app and has added public channels, a classifieds board and, in 2026, a wallet for the cryptocurrency Tulparcoin. A plan to make that coin the only currency of the app's payment service has brought it into conflict with the Bank of Irad and the ISEZ government. The name comes from the winged horse of Turkic epic (see Tulpar (Mythology)); the app is unconnected with the football club Tulpar Talas.[1][2]

History

Tulpar was launched in March 2019 by Tulpar Technologies, a company registered in Delaware with its office in Talas. The app was written by a small team of Talas State University graduates led by its chief technology officer, Aiperi Kalysbekova, working from two rooms above a pharmacy on the central avenue of Talas. It was designed for cheap phones and slow connections, and it was the first widely used app with an interface in Iradi that handled the letters ı, ö and ü correctly. Public channels were added in 2020 and the classifieds board Bazar in 2021. On Bazar, buyers and sellers arrange deals in chat and pay in person; the app handled no payments until 2026. Unlike the marketplace Jılmay, it offers no delivery.[1][4]

The app grew fastest during the 2023 Student Protests in Talas. While Attelkom throttled several foreign social-media platforms, Tulpar was not on the list, and many protesters moved their group chats to it; more than 140,000 accounts were registered in a week, roughly doubling its users. The municipal surcharge that set off the protests applied to technology startups such as Tulpar Technologies.[9] In February and March 2025, after Donald Trump's remarks about selling Irad to Russia (see 2025 Trump Remarks on Irad), posts calling Tulpar "the American app" spread widely, pointing to its Delaware registration and its founder's US citizenship, and urging users to "delete Tulpar and keep Irad". Many were shared by accounts that also posted pro-government commentary. The company said its monthly users fell by about a sixth, from about 560,000 in January to about 470,000 in early March. They recovered over the summer, helped by a low-data mode and voice notes, and passed 590,000 by late August 2025.[5][6] By October 2026 the company reported 1.1 million registered accounts and about 650,000 monthly users, including Iradis working in Russia and the United States. These figures have not been independently verified.[2]

Company

Tulpar Technologies has about forty staff. Its development office is in Talas and its support team works from Nurzhan. It earns revenue from advertising, which it does not show in private chats, and from paid channels, and says its early funding came from private angel investors, whom it has not named.[10] Its leadership in 2026 was:

Features

Users chat in private conversations and in public rooms organised by city and interest, among them rooms for Talas, Nurzhan, the rural valleys, horses, the Irad League and Iradis abroad. Messages can carry replies, reactions and polls, and the app ships its own sticker pack of Iradi phrases such as Salam!, Rahmat! and Bilbeim ("I don't know"). Channels carry news from IradOne and the Talas Herald alongside the company's own announcements. Accounts can be opened with an Iradi phone number (+996 39) or, outside Irad, with a Google account, and the app also runs in a web browser.[10]

In 2026 the company added a Services section built around Tulpar Pay: mobile top-up for Attelkom numbers, bill payment, a taxi service, food delivery from partner restaurants in Talas (Chaikhana Bakyt by Bazar-i Kalan, Taquería Semiz in Semiz, Altyn Tower Pizza by Altyn Tower, Nan & Boorsok near the central square and Shashlyk Kara-Suu on the eastern edge of the city), instalment purchases (Bölüp tölöö) and transfers to Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Russia and Uzbekistan, alongside free information pages for weather, exchange rates, bus departures from Talas, the church calendar and sport fixtures. Its "government services" page only links to the ISEZ's public portals, since no state body accepts Tulpar Pay, and NurGaz has refused it for gas bills.[10]

Tulpar Pay and Tulparcoin

When Tulparcoin was launched in September 2026, its free allocation of 100 coins was paid into wallets inside the app, one per registered phone number. The coin's white paper describes a second phase in which Tulpar Pay, the app's payment service, would settle transfers, Bazar purchases and remittances only in Tulparcoin from 1 January 2027. Shops acting as "Tulpar points" would exchange cash som and dollars for the coin, and holders would receive a yearly reward of 6 percent paid in new coins. Ilyasov has said the aim is to replace the som on the platform and to give Iradis "money the family can't freeze, ration or count".[2][3]

On 29 September 2026 the Bank of Irad said Tulpar Pay would be an unlicensed payment and deposit-taking service under the Banking and Commercial Currency Act of 1993. Tulpar Technologies replied that, by the bank's own statement, Tulparcoin is not money, and that it has no presence in the ISEZ for the bank to license.[3] The NurGaz president Kamran Bekzatov called the coin "a toy that can burn down a house". Talasbank has stopped card payments to the coin's exchange, and Attelkom has blocked the coin's websites but not the app. Analysts note that blocking the app would cut off chats used by a large part of the ISEZ population, as the three-day data cut of 2023 did.[3] Economists, the opposition site FreeIrad.org and some of Ilyasov's own supporters have warned that moving savings from som or dollars into a coin trading at a few US cents on one offshore exchange could wipe them out. Ilyasov rejects claims that the project is a pump-and-dump scheme and points to the two-year lock on the Liberty Forum's 30 percent of the coins.[3]

Dispute over the name

The Talas Commercial Development Group, owner of the football club Tulpar Talas, registered the word Tulpar and a winged-horse emblem in 2012 under the Trademarks Act of 1995, and extended the registrations to "digital products" in 2021. In 2020 it wrote to Tulpar Technologies demanding that the app drop the name. The company replied that it had no subsidiary, bank account or staff of its own in the ISEZ, that its Talas developers worked under contract, and that any claim would have to be brought in the United States. Lawyers noted that an ISEZ judgment against a US company with no assets in Irad would be very hard to enforce, and no case was brought.[7]

The club's owner moved only when Tulparcoin was launched in 2026, suing the Liberty Forum of Irad, which is registered in Talas and issued the coin, rather than the app's company. Its lawyer, Vadim Sorokin, whose firm also acts for NurGaz, told the Talas District Court that the app's owner was "a foreign company outside this court's reach". Ilyasov said: "They could not reach the app, so they have come for the coin." The case was adjourned to 16 November 2026.[8]

See also

External links

References

  1. ^ Talas Herald (14 March 2019). 'Ilyasov launches Tulpar, a free chat app that writes Iradi properly' Talas.
  2. ^ Talas Herald (24 September 2026). 'Tulpar Pay to drop the som for Tulparcoin in January, white paper says' Talas.
  3. ^ Talas Herald (30 September 2026). 'Bank of Irad: Tulpar Pay would need a licence it does not have' Talas.
  4. ^ Talas Herald (9 June 2021). 'Tulpar opens Bazar, a classifieds board without a checkout' Talas.
  5. ^ Talas Herald (6 March 2025). 'Tulpar loses users after posts brand it "the American app"' Talas.
  6. ^ Talas Herald (27 August 2025). 'Tulpar says it has won back the users it lost in the spring' Talas.
  7. ^ Talas Herald (18 November 2020). 'Club owner's letter over Tulpar name meets a Delaware address' Talas.
  8. ^ Talas Herald (12 October 2026). 'Court adjourns Tulparcoin name case to November without an injunction' Talas.
  9. ^ Central Asian Cultural Studies Review (2025). 'One App for Everything: Tulpar and the Iradi Internet.' Vol. 17, pp. 44–67.
  10. ^ Tulpar Technologies (2026). About us. Talas.
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