Chintai, a blockchain provider and trading platform regulated by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), and Indonesia’s Maluku Archipelago Joint Venture (MAJV) announced on January 6 an agreement to tokenize development rights spanning a 60-year period and covering some 710,000 square kilometers in the Indonesian provinces of Maluku and North Maluku.
The geographical scope and value of the resource rights alone – $28 billion over a development cycle of 60 years as estimated by MAJV management in collaboration with Frost & Sullivan – make this one of world’s larger resource development and related infrastructure projects comparable to projects and funds in the traditional financing world such as Blackstone’s private equity fund or KKR’s $95 billion infrastructure fund K-INFRA.
The MAJV is a collaboration between Canada’s DeepGreenX Group (DGX) and Forest First International (FFI) to develop the Maluku region through large-scale digitalization of natural assets, green energy (geothermal, hydro, micro-nuclear), and AI-driven infrastructure.
But what makes the Chintai-MAJV undertaking unique are its two principal characteristics:
- First, it lives in the world of real-world-asset tokenization and thus is accessible to investments in the hundred thousand to million dollar range rather than tens or hundreds of millions, and it makes such investments efficient, uncomplicated and transparent, as is the great attraction of blockchain technology.
- Second, it’s no ordinary exploitative mining, forestry or fisheries project ,but reflects the MAJV’s core mission: to preserve, protect and develop the “Spice Islands” provinces’ natural assets and beauty with modern AI-supported eco-management, monitoring and preservation technology. By doing so, the MAJV will qualify for carbon-capture and other eco-credits over the life of the project, which will in turn be reinvested in the sustainable development projects described.
How did this transformative development finance venture come about and what are its prospects for serving as a model for institutional investment in Southeast Asian and wider developing Asia infrastructure and resource development?
To understand the process, Asia Times spoke with two of the protagonists: DeepGreenX and MAJV Chief Executive Barclay Knapp and Chintai Chief Executive David Packham.
Barclay Knapp, a Harvard MBA and successful entrepreneur in the communications technology industry with 40 years of experience, developed DeepGreenX with the conviction that green is not just beautiful but that green AI-assisted technology will also be financially successful.
David Packham looks back on a 20-year career in conventional finance in London with Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs, then sought new challenges in the blockchain world, which took him to Singapore, where openness to new fintech opportunities has found greater regulatory support than in Old Europe.
Starting in 2024, Knapp began exploring areas in developing Asia suitable for the right combination of ecological preservation and technological innovation that defines the DGX development approach. The resource-rich Maluku Archipelago offered ideal opportunities. The task now was to implement sustainable development of the Maluku provinces’ forestry, mining, fisheries, marine assets, and other ecosystems and sectors – along with the infrastructure to support them.
The traditional approach would have been a sequence of real estate deals to acquire the land and ocean assets, then to exploit them economically… to the likely benefit of the developer, but the equally likely detriment to the environment and the future livelihoods of the previous owners of the real assets.
Instead, the Maluku Cooperation Agreements were crafted between the Maluku Archipelago land- and sea-asset owners and MAJV, in which the real estate owners retain their property rights while MAJV and partners acquire exclusive long-term development rights. Profit shares are set down on a contractual basis, and the rights agreement includes new ecological preservation and monitoring facilities, as well as new transportation, fisheries, commercial, and trade infrastructure. The rights agreement is a private contract between the land owners and MAJV, but legally sanctioned by the Maluku provincial authorities.
The MAJV Nature Maluku Project includes as its main segments transportation infrastructure (short-range passenger and cargo airports, port facilities, roads), a power grid, data centers, ecotourism and residential facilities, sustainable agriculture development including medical herbs plantations, ethical mining, and carbon capturing.
An absolutely critical ingredient to the feasibility of the Maluku Project is the tokenization of the development rights, which, without touching property rights, converts the targeted $28B in development rights, conceived as real-world assets, into digital tokens on the blockchain, enabling fractional ownership, improved liquidity, and global access. Thus, the estimated value inherent in those rights, but as such, illiquid, is unlocked and becomes the source of the infrastructure financing.
According to Packham, the collaboration between his tokenization platform and MAJV began in March 2025. The tokenization was in essence completed by the end of December 2025, an astonishingly rapid infrastructure financing process which, in traditional finance, likely would have taken years to finalize.
Chintai is regulated by the MAS. The regulated Natural Asset token is now held in escrow by Chintai, is structured as a treasury-backed digital asset, and will be designated under the ticker $MLKU, with a total supply of 1 billion tokens. It is anticipated that the token will be offered initially through a private placement to institutional investors and qualified purchasers, and more broadly in subsequent rounds via a Cayman Islands-regulated Master-Feeder-Fund structure that is being put in place presently by law firms in the jurisdiction.
Both the Chintai and MAJV CEOs noted to Asia Times that, while their joint undertaking given its scale and scope are firsts in global development financing, the process was smooth and uncomplicated and will unlock value at a speed and magnitude that simply would have been impossible with conventional models and – much like the precedent of the invention of mortgage backed securities (MBS) in the 1980s – will be a very substantial growth catalyst.