Former GE Capital and DVB Bank executives are launching a blockchain based shipowing investment platform Shipowner.io.
- Shipowners.io is aiming to reverse the trends of consolidation.
- They plan to open up the owning of shipping assets to wider group of people.
- A new online exchange will take care of this.
- Investors can invest on 10 fractions of 10 different vessels.
The world’s first distributed ledger platform for financing assets in the shipping industry, the Shipowner.io aims to reverse the current trend of consolidation by opening up the owning of shipping assets to a much wider group of individuals.
Mitul Dave, the co-founder of the Alphaseas Group who runs Shipowner.io describes himself as the “commander” of the platform. He was formerly associated with GE Capital Bank, and Erdal Uludag, “lieutenant – assets & services”, also previously from GE Capital and DVB Transport.
Shipowning For All
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.
However, question remains on how to access the system. The Ship Industry Participation (SHIP) has issued tokens on Ethereum blockchain for this purpose, which have a high levels of transparency.
An online digital exchange is set to be launched “in a few months” where the fund managers or the investors could 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.
An Investor’s Delight
“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.”
The biggest triumph card of this system is the minimizing the risk taken by the investors. The owner does not have to 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.
The company has already secured commitments of $200m in assets and services which are looking to raise funds through this platform. Another $14bn finance is on the horizon and will be effective by 2023. Perhaps, it isn’t early to say that Shipowner.io will be on a roll in the near future.
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Source: Seatrade Maritime
