A $500 Million Pipeline to Tokenize 35 Ships: What Holders Would Actually Own

ADI Foundation CEO Andrei Lazarenko described the project in a November 7 interview on Cointelegraph's X account: a pipeline of about 35 commercial vessels worth around $500 million, with settlement expected in stablecoins including DDSC, a dirham-linked token, according to TokenPost. The interview restated a deal that was first announced in August, and the partner in the primary reporting is Shipfinex, a Dubai-based maritime tokenization platform. It is a proposed pipeline. No ship tokens have been issued, and none of it is completed financing.

The Deal as Announced

Shipfinex and ADI Chain, an Abu Dhabi institutional blockchain platform founded by Sirius International Holding, a subsidiary of International Holding Company (IHC), announced an exclusive partnership in August. Shipfinex originates and structures eligible maritime assets, and ADI Chain provides the blockchain, distribution and settlement layer. The initial pipeline is around 35 vessels valued at about $500 million, and the first phase focuses on settling product structures and preparing qualifying ships. That works out to roughly $14 million per vessel on average (RWAToday arithmetic). CryptoNexa quotes an industry source putting individual secondary-market ships at $30 million to $120 million, so the sources don't say what kind of vessels are in the pipeline.

What a Token Holder Would Own

Each vessel would sit in its own special purpose vehicle. Depending on the final product, Ledger Insights reports, tokens could give exposure to vessel-backed credit, charter revenue, or a fractional share of broader economic interests in the ship. The vessels remain owned and operated the way commercial ships always have been. So the answer to “who owns the ship” is the SPV, and what a holder owns is a claim on that vehicle's credit, revenue or economics. The product structure had not been finalized in the August coverage.

Settlement and Status

• Stablecoins. Allocations and distributions are expected in stablecoins denominated in UAE dirhams and US dollars. DDSC is a dirham stablecoin backed one-to-one by reserves, launched on ADI Chain in February after UAE Central Bank approval, initiated by IHC and First Abu Dhabi Bank. Lazarenko says ADI Chain is the exclusive settlement layer for DDSC and runs on UAE sovereign cloud infrastructure in a structure that lets regulators oversee the chain.
• Regulatory. Ledger Insights reported that Shipfinex holds in-principle approval from Dubai's Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority for broker-dealer services but is not yet operational, and that no maritime tokens had been issued publicly. Other coverage describes the pipeline as pending regulatory approval.
• The source mix. The November news is largely a CEO interview, so we treat it as a restatement of a plan.

The Hard Part Isn't the Technology

Ledger Insights points out that the bigger challenge for tokenized shipping sits outside the technology. Vessels frequently change hands, operate under flags of convenience and are held through layers of corporate entities, and many investors may know little about what they are buying. That is the same question we ask of any real asset: what is the legal claim, who enforces it and where (what counts as a real-world asset; our risk guide).

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