Shipfinex and ADI Chain: The Partnership, the Structure, and What Has Not Yet Been Issued

Capt. Vikas Pandey, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Shipfinex

Today ADI Chain and Shipfinex announced that we have entered an exclusive partnership to establish the first regulated, institutional-grade tokenized maritime asset class. This post is a plain walkthrough of what that sentence means, what sits behind it, and what does not yet exist.

I spent most of my working life on ships before I built a company, and one habit survives from that time: a suspicion of announcements. At sea, nothing is trusted because it was declared. It is trusted because of who signed for it, what the paperwork actually says, and whether anyone is still standing there when something goes wrong. So this is written the way I would want to read it if it were somebody else's company.

The problem we are working on

Over 80% of international trade in goods is carried by sea, by volume. Source: UNCTAD, Review of Maritime Transport. The global fleet and orderbook was valued at approximately $2.17 trillion at end-2025. Source: Clarksons, cited in Petrofin Global Bank Research, July 2026.

Against an asset base of that size, the capital that funds it comes from a narrow group: shipowners themselves, a few dozen banks, the leasing houses, and a small number of specialist funds. Ownership sits fragmented across thousands of predominantly small and mid-sized operators, many of which have limited access to new sources of capital.

The result is an odd shape. An enormous, globally traded, income-producing asset class, financed by a market that most capital cannot reach and that most owners cannot easily approach. That is not a technology failure, and I would ask anyone writing about our industry to stop describing it as one. It is a market structure problem. There is no standard instrument, no shared record of who holds what, and no route in for capital that is not already inside the room.

Who we have partnered with

ADI Foundation is a non-profit organisation supporting the adoption of trusted digital infrastructure for governments, financial institutions and enterprises. It was founded by Sirius International Holding, the technology-focused subsidiary of IHC. ADI Chain, its network, has been live since December 2025.

I would rather you checked that than took it from me. All of it is a matter of public record, which is the first thing our industry asks of any counterparty and the thing most proposals in this category cannot answer. Shipping has been offered a great deal of technology over the past decade. Most of it did not survive contact with a shipowner, and the reason was almost never the software. It was that nobody could say who would be standing behind it in five years.

What the partnership establishes

Under the partnership, Shipfinex will originate, issue and structure eligible maritime assets. ADI Chain will provide the blockchain, distribution and settlement infrastructure connecting those instruments with the digital-asset economy.

The exclusivity is worth stating precisely, because it is the part that tells you how serious both sides are. Maritime Asset Tokens developed under the partnership will be issued through a regulated route and made available exclusively on ADI Chain. ADI Chain will serve as the exclusive blockchain and settlement infrastructure for the resulting digital instruments.

Institutions do not grant exclusivity casually, and neither do they accept it. It commits both parties to making one thing work rather than hedging across several. In my experience that is the difference between a programme that gets built and an announcement that gets remembered.

Subscriptions and distributions are expected to settle through stablecoins denominated in UAE Dirham, US Dollars and other currencies, creating an onshore digital settlement route for an asset class that has always been traded globally and financed locally.

The structure, which is the part that actually matters

Each eligible vessel will be held within its own legally distinct special-purpose vehicle. Its value, liabilities, income and the rights attached to it can be assessed independently.

Anyone who has financed a ship will understand immediately why that sentence is doing more work than anything else in the announcement. Fleet-level cross-collateralisation is the norm in this market, and it means a single casualty, a single arrest, a single charterer default can propagate across an entire portfolio. A capital provider looking at a fleet facility is underwriting a correlation they cannot see and cannot price.

Per-vessel isolation changes the unit of analysis. One ship. Her age, her class record, her survey position, her yard, her employment history, her charter and her counterparty. Each Maritime Asset Token will remain connected to an identifiable vessel with its own valuation, operating history, financial profile and legal structure. That is how ships have always actually been assessed by the people who know them. It is simply not how they have been financed.

Depending on the final product structure, the resulting instruments could represent vessel-backed credit, charter-linked income or economic interests. That has not been settled, and I would rather say so plainly than imply a decision we have not taken.

What does not change

This is the part I would put in front of a shipowner first, because it is the question every owner asks in the first two minutes.

The model retains the established legal and operational frameworks governing commercial ships, including ownership, flagging, insurance and maritime protections. Tokenization provides a digital representation of the economic rights linked to each vessel. It does not replace the structures through which the asset is owned and operated.

A vessel in this programme is still registered with a flag state. Still classed. Still insured on ordinary terms. Still subject to port state control, still arrestable, still governed by the same body of maritime law that has developed over three hundred years and works. Nothing in this programme asks any of that to move, and any proposal that did ask would be rejected by this industry inside a week, correctly.

On-chain records can provide a verifiable history of issuance, ownership and distributions while maintaining the eligibility and compliance requirements attached to the instrument. That is a record-keeping improvement sitting above the legal system that governs a ship. It is not a replacement for it, and describing it as one would be both wrong and, in this industry, disqualifying.

The pipeline

Shipfinex brings an initial pipeline of around 35 vessels valued at approximately half a billion US dollars. Our Maritime Asset Token architecture and per-vessel legal structure have already been designed, and the project is now moving through the pilot and operational-readiness stage.

I mention the number deliberately. A partnership announcement without one is a statement about intentions, and this industry has been offered plenty of those. The vessels are real, they are identifiable, and the work of preparing them is the work of the next phase rather than something already completed.

What has not happened yet

Shipfinex holds an In-Principle Approval from Dubai's Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority for broker-dealer services and is working toward operational launch. An In-Principle Approval is not an operating licence.

No Maritime Asset Tokens have yet been issued publicly.

The regulated issuance route is being finalised. The initial product structure has not been confirmed. The first phase of this partnership is precisely that work: finalising the route, confirming the structure, and preparing vessels from the pipeline for tokenization.

Designed. Not yet issued.

That is the honest status, and it is also the plan. In this category, announcements routinely blur what has been agreed with what has been built, and a reader cannot tell the difference unless the company states it. So we have stated it.

We would rather be checked than believed.