The Shipfinex vessel tokenisation pipeline has a settlement layer most comparable deals lack: a dirham-denominated stablecoin already live on the same chain and cleared for institutional use. Dubai-based Shipfinex has partnered with ADI Chain to tokenise approximately 35 vessels valued at around $500 million, placing each ship inside a separate special-purpose vehicle (SPV) to isolate economic rights on a ship-by-ship basis.
No Maritime Asset Tokens have been publicly issued. The partnership remains in pilot and operational-readiness phase, with the regulated issuance route still being finalised. What exists today is a pipeline structure and a chain that already handles dirham settlement at scale.
SPV Architecture and What the Tokens Could Represent
Each vessel in the planned portfolio will sit inside its own SPV. That legal wrapper lets the economic rights attached to one ship be structured, transferred, or wound down independently from the rest of the fleet. Depending on transaction design, the tokens could represent vessel-backed credit, charter-linked income, or other economic interests tied to a specific ship.
It is a structure the maritime sector has seen before. When Ethra Ship launched its blockchain investment protocol earlier this year, it similarly used vessel-owning SPVs as the off-chain legal base and separated that from a governance token layer. Ethra noted that individual ships in the secondary market can cost between $30 million and $120 million, illustrating why tokenisation matters: direct exposure to these assets has historically required institutional-scale capital and private market access.
Clarksons Research valued the entire world fleet and ship orderbook at approximately $2.1 trillion at the start of 2026. The Shipfinex portfolio, at $500 million, is a fraction of that, but the SPV model is designed to allow granular slicing of an asset class that has traditionally moved through bank loans, leasing arrangements, and private capital.
Shipfinex Vessel Tokenisation Relies on a Stablecoin Rail Already Battle-Tested
Primary allocations and distributions under the Shipfinex structure are expected to use stablecoins denominated in UAE dirhams, US dollars, and potentially other currencies. The dirham leg already exists on ADI Chain in the form of DDSC, a stablecoin backed one-to-one by UAE dirham reserves.
DDSC launched on ADI Chain in February after receiving approval from the UAE Central Bank. The project was initiated by International Holding Company (IHC) and First Abu Dhabi Bank, which acts as the banking partner for the stablecoin, providing custody of fiat reserves and bringing approximately 4 million customers across 20 markets onto ADI Chain’s rails. Sirius International Holding, IHC’s technology-focused subsidiary, joined the project to support deployment and institutional adoption; sovereign investor ADQ was named at the April 2025 announcement but has not featured in subsequent announcements, according to Ledger Insights.
The stablecoin has already processed volume at institutional scale. IHC executed a 110 million dirham (approximately $30 million) transaction using DDSC on ADI Chain, described by Cointelegraph as one of the largest disclosed stablecoin transactions executed in the UAE. DDSC has also received a No Objection Certificate from the UAE Central Bank allowing distribution via exchanges regulated by Dubai’s Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA), extending the stablecoin beyond institutional settlement to retail and merchant payments.
For Shipfinex, that existing infrastructure matters. ADI Chain does not need to build dirham settlement capacity from scratch to support vessel token distributions; the rails are already licensed and live.
Where This Sits in the Broader RWA Market
Data from RWA.xyz put total tokenised real-world assets at approximately $38.1 billion as of 9 August. US Treasury debt accounted for about $16.2 billion of that figure; tokenised commodities represented another $4.9 billion. The market started 2025 at around $5.4 billion and had already reached $31–34 billion by May, with Ethereum hosting roughly 60% of the value at that point.
Vessel tokenisation sits in the harder-to-move category of that expansion, alongside private credit and infrastructure. Ownership, financing, and income rights are tied to physical assets through legal entities rather than natively on-chain. The SPV layer is what makes the legal mapping work; ADI Chain handles distribution and settlement on top of it.
Institutional forecasts suggest the structural shift has further to run. Standard Chartered‘s head of digital asset research Geoff Kendrick projects tokenised real-world assets (excluding stablecoins) reaching $2 trillion by end-2028, with another $2 trillion from stablecoins bringing the combined total to $4 trillion. CoinDesk reported that Standard Chartered’s May 2026 analysis argues this growth would pull liquidity into established DeFi protocols, citing BlackRock’s BUIDL tokenised Treasury fund as an early example of an institutional asset operating across both traditional finance and on-chain yield infrastructure. BCG and Ripple put the longer-term figure higher still, estimating $18.9 trillion in tokenisable assets by 2033.
Shipfinex’s immediate test is simpler: completing pilot preparations and securing the regulated issuance route for the Maritime Asset Tokens. Until that clears, the $500 million pipeline stays off-chain. The dirham settlement layer is ready; the question is whether the token structure follows.
