Project history · Published May 2026
From inception to Canton.
A short, two-chapter history of the Boli project — from the concept presented at Crossroads Maldives in October 2021, through the quiet hiatus that began in January 2024, to the platform built on Canton Network in the first quarter of 2026 and the project's positioning for the institutional adoption cycle now under way. Published for context; not an offering document.
Origin — Crossroads Maldives, October 2021
The concept that became Boli was first presented in October 2021 at Create, an event organised by The Eco Org at Crossroads Maldives and co-sponsored by Boli. The audience brought together policymakers from the European Union and the Government of Maldives, early-stage companies, non-profit organisations, and contributors from the wider distributed-ledger ecosystem, including Cosmos. The pitch covered three connected research themes: interoperable, decentralised digital identities; the tokenisation of real-world assets in island and small-state contexts; and blockchain-based governance.
Launch — Cosmos HackAtom, December 2021
In December 2021, Boli won a prize under the Earth category at the Cosmos HackAtom — the global hackathon run by the Interchain Foundation and the Cosmos ecosystem. The prize marked the project's formal launch and the start of dedicated engineering work on a tokenisation platform aligned with the Cosmos SDK and Inter-Blockchain Communication protocol.
Early support — 2021 to early 2023
Between 2021 and early 2023, the project was supported through the founders' own personal financing, through in-kind contributions from a limited group of founding contributors and ecosystem partners paid directly to third-party vendors, and through pass-through funds received by the founders for the specific purpose of paying third-party vendors and service providers engaged on the project. Support took the form of payments for venues — including Crossroads Maldives and Patina Maldives — travel costs for speakers, development work, and other logistical and operational costs of the project's early work. The founders acted purely as a conduit for the pass-through funds and did not retain them as compensation or for any personal benefit. It was not a public offering, was not marketed publicly, and was conducted outside any public token distribution. As of the project's hiatus in 2024, no tokens had been distributed publicly and no public offering had been made.
This work took place before the EU's Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation was in force — MiCA was adopted by the European Parliament on 20 April 2023 and by the Council on 16 May 2023, published in the Official Journal on 9 June 2023, and entered into force on 29 June 2023, with full application from 30 December 2024.
The Boli Association
In 2021, following the Crossroads event, the founders established the Boli Association in Switzerland as a non-profit Verein. Its engagement with the Boli platform is at the research level only: open working papers, convened working groups, and — on a transitional basis — anchoring the editorial process for the Boli Standards Proposals until the Boli Foundation is established. Upon Foundation formation, standards-setting governance will pass to the Foundation. The Association does not engage in commercial activity for the platform: it issues no tokens, holds no equity, takes no commercial mandates, sells no services, earns no fees, and is not the publisher of the platform whitepaper.
Resume Maldives — first-chapter commercial and engineering vehicle
The commercial and engineering work of the project's first chapter was carried out by Resume Maldives Private Limited, a company registered in the Maldives and held by the founders. Resume Maldives was the vehicle through which engineering on the Cosmos-based platform was developed and through which the project's commercial activity ran. As of the most recent Asia/Pacific Group Mutual Evaluation Report (October 2025) and IMF Article IV Consultation (April 2024), the Maldives does not operate a dedicated licensing regime for virtual-asset service providers, and no in-force Maldivian rule recognises crypto-assets or blockchain activity as a separately regulated category outside the perimeter described in those reports. Resume Maldives sat apart from the Boli Association, which had no engineering or commercial scope. Its role was specific to the first chapter; the project's current shape does not run through it.
Two market shocks — Terra/Luna and FTX
In May 2022, the algorithmic stablecoin TerraUSD lost its peg to the United States dollar, and the associated LUNA token entered a hyperinflationary collapse over five days. In November 2022, FTX Trading Ltd. and more than 130 affiliated entities filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The SEC, the U.S. Department of Justice for the Southern District of New York, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission brought parallel enforcement actions on 13 December 2022.
Pivot to research and partnership building
After the Terra and FTX events, Boli made the decision to step back from any planned public token activity. Launching a token into a market in the state of late 2022 was, on the project's own reading, neither sustainable nor in the interests of contributors. The project redirected work into research and partnership building.
Boli's research collaboration with The Eco Org centred on three themes: supply-chain verification and transparency through the use of blockchain, the tokenisation of natural assets and biodiversity, and closing the digital divide with technology — including AI and blockchain. The Eco Org was at the time running its own project-level partnerships with UNICEF, Mastercard, and a group of universities; Boli participated in that wider programme as Eco Org's technical partner — and co-sponsored several of the joint projects on an in-kind basis — rather than as a counterparty to those institutions directly. Alongside the research track, the team travelled across the atolls, met with island councils, and ran field-level conversations on how these patterns could be relevant to an archipelagic state's administrative geography.
Institutional engagement in the Maldives
During this period the project engaged with the Housing Development Corporation, the state-owned entity then managing the Hulhumalé smart-city programme, on research questions relevant to that programme. Boli participated in conferences organised by institutions of the Government of Maldives during 2022 and 2023. Boli's role across these engagements was research-only, as a technical contributor; no commercial agreements were made.
Parallel Events, Patina Maldives — July 2023
In July 2023 Boli sponsored Parallel Events at Patina Maldives, a closed-door programme that brought together policymakers, government ministers, investors, and technology leaders to present and discuss work toward a sustainable future. The programme ran adjacent to the project's continuing institutional engagement in the country.
Regulatory shift — MiCA and the recast TFR
The European Parliament adopted MiCA (Regulation (EU) 2023/1114) on 20 April 2023, alongside the recast Transfer of Funds Regulation extending Travel Rule information requirements to crypto-asset transfers. The Council adopted both on 16 May 2023, the Official Journal published on 9 June 2023, and the regulations entered into force on 29 June 2023. Full application followed on 30 December 2024.
The 2021 environment in which Boli had been designed — pre-MiCA, with national regimes plus the existing EU Prospectus Regulation private-placement exemptions — was no longer the environment a 2024 launch would operate in. The trajectory was clear from April 2023 onward.
Government transition and the quiet hiatus
In September 2023 the Maldives elected a new government. Several of the institutional relationships and policy lines Boli had been working under were carried by the previous administration. Together with the continuing bear-market environment and the regulatory shift in the European Union, the conditions in which the project had been operating no longer held. Through the closing weeks of 2023 the active work tapered, and by January 2024 the project had quietly entered a hiatus. There was no announcement; the founders kept the option open to resume when the environment became more favourable.
The restart signal — June 2025
On 3 June 2025, the founder published Bringing Back Boli — Building an Alternative Asset Infrastructure with Canton Network, the first public statement on the project's resumption after the 2024 hiatus. The article set out the case for rebuilding Boli on institutional infrastructure rather than on a general-purpose chain, and signalled the project's intention to return to active work.
Tenzro Labs partnership — Q4 2025
In the fourth quarter of 2025 the project secured an incubator partnership with Tenzro Labs. Under the partnership, Tenzro Labs covers the engineering, server, and operational costs of the project's return to active development through to testnet, and provides access to Canton-aligned infrastructure for Boli's deployment. The arrangement preserved the project's ability to take its time on the platform rebuild — institutional infrastructure, by its nature, does not reward haste.
Platform built on Canton — Q1 2026
Through the first quarter of 2026 the engineering team built the platform on Canton Network. Canton publishes a cumulative figure of more than US$6 trillion in tokenised real-world assets and over US$300 billion in daily U.S. Treasury repo trades, across more than 600 participating institutions, including Goldman Sachs, BNY, DTCC, BNP Paribas, HSBC, Deutsche Börse, Cboe Global Markets, Euroclear, and Kinexys by J.P. Morgan. In December 2025, the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation announced a partnership with Digital Asset to tokenise DTC-custodied U.S. Treasury securities on Canton, with a controlled-production MVP scheduled for the first half of 2026 and broader industry rollout in the second half.
For Boli, the move to Canton resolved the question the project had been carrying since 2022: how to align an institution-facing tokenisation platform with the infrastructure the institutions themselves were settling on. Canton is that infrastructure.
Maldivian ecosystem — reconnection
Through the first quarter of 2026 Boli reconnected with the Maldivian ecosystem. Asset owners across real estate, hospitality, and private real-world-asset categories authorised the project to bring their assets on-chain, with an aggregate underlying value in excess of US$300 million. The basis for those authorisations was the infrastructure: a settlement and registry environment trusted by the world's largest financial institutions, paired with modern AI capabilities for asset administration and governance. The Maldivian policy backdrop has itself moved forward — the Maldives International Financial Centre was established in May 2025 with an explicit digital-asset and tokenisation mandate, and the Maldives International Financial Services Authority was established in January 2024.
AI from Tenzro
The platform integrates AI capabilities provided through Tenzro, designed for the operational work of real-world-asset tokenisation and institutional governance: asset administration, compliance workflows, document handling, and the multi-party coordination patterns that institutional settlement requires. The intent is not to ship AI as a feature in its own right, but to remove the operational drag that has kept tokenisation pilots from becoming production deployments.
2026 — a different operating environment
The conditions in which Boli is now operating are materially clearer than those of 2021–2023. In the European Union, MiCA entered full application on 30 December 2024, and the European Securities and Markets Authority issued its Guidelines on Reverse Solicitation on 26 February 2025. In the United States, the GENIUS Act was signed into law on 18 July 2025, providing the first federal framework for payment stablecoins; market- structure legislation building on the House-passed FIT21 advanced through both Senate Banking and Senate Agriculture committee drafts in January 2026. In the United Arab Emirates, the Abu Dhabi Global Market's Financial Services Regulatory Authority finalised its staking framework in September 2025 and presented further enhancements at Abu Dhabi Finance Week 2025; the Dubai Financial Services Authority implemented updates to its crypto-token regulatory framework on 12 January 2026. In Singapore, the Monetary Authority's Project Guardian moved from pilot to operational framework for tokenised funds.
Testnet and mainnet
The testnet is expected to go live in the second quarter of 2026, with mainnet expected in the fourth quarter. The schedule is forward-looking and conditional on the platform meeting the production-readiness criteria the project has set for itself; the institutional posture of Canton Network does not reward shipping early.
Operating shape today
Initial project management and development work in the project's first chapter was carried out by Resume Maldives Private Limited. That arrangement was specific to the first chapter and is no longer the project's operating shape. The platform is now built by engineering entities incubated and partnered for the work, with infrastructure provided by Tenzro Labs. The Boli Association, the Swiss research association founded in 2021, continues in its research role from inception.
Ecosystem and token
Ecosystem and token matters — $BOLI utility design, treasury stewardship, and the governance path — sit with the Boli Foundation and are published separately at
boli.foundation. The Foundation is governed separately from the platform engineering organisation, the infrastructure partner, and the research Association.
For the canonical platform reference, see the whitepaper. For the entity picture today, see company.