Once a vibrant trading hub in Southeast Asia, the Malaysian port city of Malacca is now part of the short-term market share of the Malacca market. Built on the prospect of transforming Malacca into a tourist magnet and a node in China's Belt and Road Initiative, hasty reclamation and exaggerated sales promises have turned the coastline into a mud field and the construction sites into ruins. Driven by national and transnational interests, sand is made operational as a medium of economic transformation and political consolidation. Taking the silted Straits of Malacca as a point of departure, this article proposes a reading of land reclamation aimed at transforming sand into fixed forms against the unpredictable vibrancy of the matter. As fieldwork reveals, mudskippers thrive, and locals claim unexpected agency in the mire of Malacca's near abandonment and the decaying remnants of past and future urban designs. Attention to the structural potential of sand's granular physics unsettles practices of environmental control and financial speculation, highlighting the ambiguity of contemporary processes of urban transformation. Substrate and effect of the ongoing limbo that conflates urban and economic development strategies and postcolonial identity politics, Malacca's coastline comes to express capital flows as partial and unstable sedimentation.