From islands to institutions — the arc of the work.
The Association was formed as a Swiss Verein in 2021 and has run in two distinct phases since. Between 2021 and 2023, a field programme in the Maldives explored decentralized governance and ecosystem tokenization in direct partnership with national and local government, and in association with a Maldivian non-profit leading programmes backed by UNICEF, Mastercard, Ooredoo, and other sponsors. From 2025, the work narrowed to institutional-grade tokenization, AI and agentic verification, and the market plumbing in between — carried out from Zürich with Canton Foundation and Tenzro Network as anchor partners.
Two eras, one continuous question.
The field and the research phases are driven by the same underlying question — how to make new financial and governance primitives legible to the institutions that must supervise them — at very different altitudes.
Applied work on decentralized governance, tokenized natural-capital instruments, and sustainable community design, under formal arrangements with Maldivian government institutions and in association with The Eco Org on programmes backed by UNICEF, Mastercard, Ooredoo, and other sponsors.
The Association — a Swiss Verein since 2021 — consolidates in Zürich and narrows its mandate from applied field practice to research, standards, and convening.
Working groups on asset standards, AI and agentic verification, cross-border settlement, and market structure. Anchor partnerships with Canton Foundation (institutional tokenized finance) and Tenzro Network (decentralized AI).
On islands, with governments, on biodiversity and community design.
Much of what became the Association's research programme started as applied work. The questions were concrete: whether decentralized governance primitives could be implemented alongside national legal frameworks; whether tokenization could carry ecological commitments without diluting them; whether small, distributed populations exposed to climate risk could use programmable financial instruments to strengthen local resilience.
The Maldivian context was formative. A small sovereign with a geographically dispersed population, a revenue base concentrated in tourism and fisheries, meaningful climate exposure, and a government willing to experiment with digital-first policy — it was an unusually well-matched setting for applied work on these questions.
- Location — Maldives
- Direct counterparts — HDC, other Maldivian national entities, local island-council governments
- Associated partner of — The Eco Org (Maldivian non-profit, lead implementer on sponsor-backed programmes)
- Programmes referenced — backed by UNICEF, Mastercard, Ooredoo, and other sponsors through The Eco Org
Four strands, carried out in parallel.
Decentralized governance for island communities
Applied work on institutional design for small, geographically distributed island populations — how decision-making, resource allocation, and public accountability could be restructured around digitally-native governance primitives while remaining compatible with national legal frameworks.
Tokenization for ecosystems and biodiversity
Structuring conservation finance, biodiversity credits, and ecosystem-service rights as auditable on-chain instruments. The question was whether tokenized representations could make ecological assets legible to institutional capital without degrading the environmental commitments they were meant to protect.
Sustainable community and societal design
Economic-model design for small populations exposed to climate and revenue-concentration risk: programmable transfer mechanisms, local revenue capture from tourism and fisheries, and financial primitives for community-scale resilience.
Convening and public discourse
Multi-stakeholder forums bringing together government officials, multilateral agencies, private-sector partners, institutional investors, and community representatives for closed-door working sessions and open public dialogue around each of the above.
Government, lead non-profit, institutional.
Boli held direct formal arrangements with Maldivian government institutions — HDC, other national entities, and local island-council governments. Its role on multi-sponsor international programmes was indirect: participation as a technical associate through The Eco Org, the Maldivian non-profit that held lead-implementer status.
Boli held direct formal working relationships with Maldivian government institutions, including the Housing Development Corporation (HDC), other national government entities, and local island-council governments. These engagements — structured as technical-advisory arrangements under public-programme frameworks — covered environment, finance, digital-policy, and community-scale infrastructure portfolios.
Boli worked in association with The Eco Org, a Maldivian non-profit that acted as the lead implementer on a portfolio of programmes backed by UNICEF, Mastercard, Ooredoo, and other multilateral and private-sector sponsors. Boli's contribution was a technical-associate role — decentralized-governance design, tokenization-infrastructure research, and governance modelling — contributed through The Eco Org rather than under any direct agreement with the programme sponsors.
Ongoing dialogue with institutional investors exploring conservation-finance and ecosystem-service instruments, and participation in the early conversations on voluntary standards for tokenized natural-capital assets.
Closed-door working sessions and open public dialogue.
Across the three-year programme, Boli organised and co-hosted convenings that brought government officials, multilateral agencies, private-sector partners, institutional investors, and community representatives into the same room. Some were small technical working sessions; others were public forums designed to surface the trade-offs to a broader audience.
Topics included the legal and technical architecture for tokenized ecosystem-service instruments, the governance implications of digitally-native public-programme design, and the appropriate role of private capital in financing climate and biodiversity commitments in small-island states.
The convening programme that the Association now runs in Zürich — the annual summit, quarterly roundtables, and public lecture series — is a direct descendant of that earlier convening practice.
From field practice to research mandate.
This period was deliberately quiet. The field experience had made clear that durable progress on any of the substantive questions — how to represent regulated assets on-chain, how to make AI outputs verifiable to a supervisory standard, how to coordinate cross-border settlement — depended on infrastructural work that no single project could carry.
The Association, a Swiss Verein since 2021 that had run in parallel with the field programme, consolidated in Zürich and narrowed its mandate accordingly. The next phase would be research, standards-oriented convening, and technical-capability building across a small number of deeply engaged ecosystems — rather than a wide portfolio of applied projects.
From Zürich, with industry leaders, on standards and verification.
The current programme is organised around four focus areas, each served by a working group and a standing research agenda. The common thread is institutional legibility: making the next generation of financial and AI primitives supervisable by the institutions that already supervise their analogues.
The Association's technical capability is deepest in the Canton ecosystem — the institutional-participant infrastructure on which the largest share of production-grade regulated tokenized activity is being built today — and in the parallel work on decentralized AI and agentic verification carried forward with Tenzro Network.
- Seat — Zürich (Swiss Verein since 2021)
- Anchor partners — Canton Foundation (institutional tokenized finance), Tenzro Network (decentralized AI)
- Working groups — asset standards, AI attestation, cross-border settlement, market structure
- Output forms — working papers, standards drafts, closed-door roundtables, annual summit
Four programmes, carried by the working groups.
Institutional-grade tokenization
Asset-representation standards for regulated instruments — funds, equities, fixed-income — designed to settle on institutional-participant infrastructure without breaking transfer restrictions, disclosure obligations, or investor-protection regimes. The working groups engage most directly across the Canton ecosystem, where the largest share of production-grade regulated tokenized activity is being built today.
AI verification and agentic systems
Technical and policy work on how AI outputs — and, increasingly, autonomous agent decisions — can be made verifiable at the standard of evidence that regulated finance requires. The AI-attestation working group develops its positions in dialogue with Tenzro Network on distributed inference, model provenance, and output verification.
Cross-border settlement and stablecoins
Applied work on payment-leg coordination for tokenized instruments that cross jurisdictional boundaries — including the supervisory treatment of stablecoins used as settlement assets, and the interaction between national payment systems and token-native rails.
Market structure for institutional digital assets
Structural research on venues, clearing, custody, and market-integrity frameworks for institutional participation in tokenized markets — with emphasis on what can be borrowed from existing securities-market supervision and what genuinely requires new primitives.
Two ecosystems, one technical programme.
These are advisory and technical partnerships — distinct from the Association's sponsor relationship with the Boli platform — and neither partner holds editorial rights over published work.
Full partnership detail, including the Association's governance relationship to each, is on the About page.
Canton Foundation
Stewards the Canton Network, the institutional-participant infrastructure on which the majority of regulated tokenized-finance activity is settled. The Association's asset-standards and cross-border-settlement working groups engage directly across the Canton ecosystem.
canton.network ↗Tenzro Network
Anchor partner on decentralized AI infrastructure. The AI-attestation working group develops its technical positions in dialogue with Tenzro's work on distributed inference, model provenance, and verification of AI and agent outputs.
tenzro.com ↗Where the current work lives.
The research, perspectives, and convening tracks are organised as standing sections of the site rather than one-off deliverables.
Long-form research outputs across the four focus areas.
Technical working groups running on multi-year mandates.
Collective authorship from the working-group membership.
The annual summit and the quarterly roundtable series.
From there to here, and onwards.
The field and research phases share a disposition: small rooms, long working papers, multi-year commitments, and a preference for institutional legibility over novelty for its own sake. Several of the practitioners who carried out the earlier field work remain involved with the Association in fellow or advisory capacities, and the current engagement style is drawn directly from that period.
The next multi-year cycle extends the Era II focus areas — with particular weight on agentic verification in regulated finance, and on the settlement and market-structure questions that arise when tokenized markets scale.