A $2 trillion asset class is getting a new blockchain rail

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.

None of that, however, gives the token holder a share in legal ownership of the ship. The token only represents a financial claim tied to the vessel, while the ship itself stays owned and operated the way commercial ships always have been.

Maritime shipping accounts for more than 80% of international trade in goods by volume, according to Tuesday’s announcement, and remains a largely untapped corner of the tokenized real-world asset market, which currently stands at roughly $38 billion.

That said, the ADI and Shipfinex partnership isn’t the category’s opening move. Galactica has already closed tokenized vessel financings, including a bridge-financing deal for a 145,000 CBM LNG carrier, on InvestaX’s regulated platform, and Ethra Ship launched a competing maritime RWA protocol in June built on an existing shipping business.

ADI Chain is the Abu Dhabi-based institutional blockchain platform founded by Sirius International Holding, the technology-focused subsidiary of International Holding Company (IHC). The blockchain already hosts DDSC, a dirham-backed stablecoin licensed by the UAE Central Bank. Earlier this year, IHC used DDSC to process a $30 million transaction on the chain.