Finance your ship with blockchain via Shipowner.io

Shipowner.io claims to be the world’s first distributed ledger platform for financing assets in the shipping industry, and aims to reverse the current trend of consolidation by opening up the owning of shipping assets to a much wider group of individuals.

Shipowner.io is run by the co-founders of the Alphaseas Group, Mitul Dave, who describes himself as the “commander” of the platform, and formerly with GE Capital Bank, and Erdal Uludag, “lieutenant – assets & services”, also previously from GE Capital and DVB Transport.

The platform claims to bring shipowning to “anyone, anytime, anywhere” with investments broken down to as little as $100, compared to the usual multi-million investments normally associated with funding shipping assets.

Access to the platform will be via Ship Industry Participation (SHIP) tokens created on Ethereum blockchain with a high levels of transparency.

Under the online digital exchange set to be launched “in a few months” a fund manager or investor could for example invest in 10 fractions of 10 different vessels and then later sell two or three factions without any changes in ownership of the underlying asset or approval of other investors.

For the owner looking to monetize their asset after an evaluation and agreement of terms with Shipowner.io the asset is transferred to a dedicated asset platform and “tokenized” into fractions for investors. Once these fractions are bought the funds are transferred to the own in a currency of their choice.

The owner does not have tp sell all the asset and between 0 – 100% can be tokenized depending on whether it an outright sale, sale and leaseback, joint venture or a debt deal.

“In a sense, this platform aims to undo the wave of consolidation that seems to be the theme of the day in many sectors by allowing the small player a level playing field versus their larger counterparts,” Shipowner.io said.

“Once that is achieved, let the player with better operations, technically and commercially win ‘eliminating’ the high cost of finance and bringing down the day to day cost of running a vessel.”

Shipowner.io said it had secured commitments of in excess of $200m in assets and services that are looking to raise funds via the platform, and has target to finance $14bn worth 2023.

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