The world’s commercial ships (the vessels themselves, not the cargo they carry) are worth an estimated $2 trillion in total. Yet the market financing their purchase and construction remains closed and relationship-driven, dominated by a small circle of shipowners, banks and specialist lenders.
That structure shuts smaller operators and alternative investors out of a significant pool of capital.
Blockchain platform ADI Chain and Dubai-based maritime tokenization firm Shipfinex want to route that market, worth an estimated $680 billion in bank lending, leasing and export credit today, through blockchain technology to open it up to a wider pool of institutional capital.
“Maritime finance has the scale, real assets and commercial activity to become a major new real-world asset category,” Ramana Kumar, President of Stablecoin Ecosystem at ADI Foundation, said in the announcement shared with CoinDesk.
The deal signals that tokenization is expanding beyond financial instruments such as government bonds and money market funds into physical, capital-intensive infrastructure, like ships and warehouses, that underpin the global economy.
Shipfinex’s job is to find ships and package them into deals while figuring out which vessels qualify, what they’re worth, and how the investment should be structured.
ADI Chain’s job is to turn those deals into blockchain tokens and handle payments using stablecoins (digital tokens pegged 1-to-1 to real currencies like the UAE dirham or the U.S. dollar), so money moves instantly without a traditional bank wire. For now, this is aimed at “qualified institutional participants,” or large, vetted investors, not everyday retail buyers.
Shipfinex CEO Capt. Vikas Pandey said the partnership would let the company “create a regulated digital route into this market, with every instrument tied to a real vessel, its economics and its legal structure.”
No maritime asset tokens have been issued yet and Shipfinex doesn’t yet have a green light to do so. Its regulatory clearance from Dubai’s Virtual Asseets Regulatory Authority is an “In-Principle Approval” — a preliminary thumbs-up confirming it has passed an initial background check, not a finished license to operate.
Nevertheless, Shipfinex has earmarked around 35 vessels worth about $500 million combined as candidates for tokenization, once the regulatory approval and deal structure are finalized. Each ship will eventually sit in its own separate legal entity, so if one ship runs into financial trouble, it doesn’t drag down investors in the others.
Buying a token, once one becomes available, could mean one of a few different things for the institutional investors, depending on how each deal ends up being structured. It could mean a loan backed by the ship (similar to earning interest on a loan), a share of the money the ship earns from shipping contracts, or a broader economic stake in the vessel’s value.
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