Island for Crypto Elite to be built on Fyre Festival Site

Photo: Alexandra the Great/Alamy Stock Photo

Last week, a consortium of tech guys and real estate developers announced what they’re calling Agia, a planned “crypto-native luxury community” in the Bahamas. Filled with images of turquoise water, white sand, people snorkelling and minimalist beach house interiors (some of which appear to be in Greece), the promotional material promises a place “grounded in the simple soulful aesthetic of the Greek Mediterranean – but vibrant with the possibility of our decentralized future.” Its “60 ultra-luxurious pavilions and villas” are only available for purchase via NFT, supposedly “the first time an entire real estate development has been exclusively for sale on the blockchain.” Although the first image on the Agia website, registered in August, comes up as a free Shutterstock image of another island in the Bahamas, scroll down a bit and you’ll come to the true parcel of land where Agia will manifest: Roker Point, a corner of the island of Great Exuma perhaps best known as the barren beachfront site of the doomed Fyre Festival.

Through no fault of its own, the area seems to have been caught in a decades-long cycle of being traded from one doomed project to another. In 2019, the Bahamian government reportedly gave Fyre Festival planner Billy McFarland the use of what was then described as some sort of abandoned plot of land surrounding an artificial lagoon. But before it was the site of the failed festival, Roker Point had been a failed luxury development, just not the crypto kind. Under the name Roker Point Estates, the land was allegedly developed 20 years ago by a property manager named John Goldsworthy, who according to Chicago agent magazine, also developed properties in Florida and Turks and Caicos. Bahamian news outlets reported that Goldsworthy spent millions developing the area, including building roads, building a seawall and installing utilities, but the 2008 market crash put the project on hold until 2012 or 2013, when he restarted construction. It was all put up for sale as recently as 2018. (One outlet quotes him as predicting a “sales wave” that never really materialized.)

The group behind Agia, according to their website, is a collection of extremely bullish crypto types plus a developer named JFB and the Setai Group, which has developed luxury hotels in Miami. Agia co-founder Erik Sanderson appears to have been with the company since 2021, and prior to that he was CEO of a marine technology company with “a unique specialization in design, engineering, construction and mega and superyacht navies.” Then there’s OA3, a web3 marketing company recently started by a prop-tech entrepreneur and “decentralized evangelist” named Deven Spear. Unchained Partners provides the “blockchain development”, a web3 strategy company led by a meme-coin founder. (One of the Unchained partners called Agia “a dream to conceive, develop and implement into reality.”) Involved in their capacity as the founders of Gemini Trust Company, the cryptocurrency exchange, are the Winklevoss twins.

So to these NFTs: To buy your villa in Agia, you need to “create a permission list NFT”, according to the promotional material, which involves buying a unique digital asset (NFT), registered on the blockchain, that represents your villa via cryptocurrency. This alone will cost you $10,000, but it will ensure you the ability to “trigger ownership NFT during the permit listing period”, which simply means buying another NFT on the blockchain, this time costs the actual amount of the villa, depending on the size of the property. (An oceanfront villa will set you back $3,495,000.) Finally, you create a final NFT called “Agia Key”, which is the deed and title to your house. Doing all this gives you access to a host of other planned amenities: 100 rounds of golf, a concierge service, a beach and yacht club (undeveloped), a spa and fitness center (undeveloped). It also provides a “fast track” to permanent residency in the Bahamas, which, to put an extremely fine point on it, the brochure says will provide “immediate access to one of the world’s most sophisticated offshore banking systems”.

This word nest is primarily an exclusivity. The bells and whistles in the Agia “lifestyle” brochure—renderings by a fancy Miami-based architect, images of bathrobes and baskets in earth tones, images of instruments in an equally unbuilt recording studio—are mostly just vibes for now. They even have their own vibe-y video with fast-paced clips of blissfully hot people on the beach (and a coconut exploding dramatically in slow motion) set to sexy music.

There is certainly a level of risk here, although this is not the first time property has been purchased using NFTs or cryptocurrency. As Decrypt reported, blockchain transactions cannot be undone, so if Agia doesn’t exactly come to fruition, those who minted their $10,000 NFTs are unlikely to get it back. Crypto and real estate have at least that in common; many highly touted, life-changing “deals” exchange a lot of money upfront, even if what’s supposed to materialize never does. And while the Bahamian prime minister is name-checked in the Agia press release as a cryptocurrency supporter, having recently declared the Bahamas a “crypto hub,” some residents are less confident. Like the Bahamian Tribune reported: “Many across the Bahamas have become increasingly skeptical about whether promised foreign direct investment (FDI) projects will actually materialize, given the country’s long history of stalled or failed development.” But the Agia boys are undeterred. If you build it, they say, the crypto elite will come. “We bought this property because we saw its future, not its past,” Sanderson said.