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.
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