Last night I went down a rabbit hole when researching the "shadow fleet" and came out the other side holding a big juicy carrot. You just never know what you are going to uncover and this research unveiled a tokenized industry about to go live. We all know getting in early is when the big money is made and this should be the case with this one.
This all stemmed from researching Sea Veritel which is a blockchain supporting the maritime shipping industry. They provide real time shipping information like vessel ownership, real time GPS co ordinates, cargo etc which is information required by insurers and shipping agents. Sea Veritel is an up and running business using nodes on the blockchain supplying up to the minute data.
If you are like me you are already asking blockchain so where are the tokens and yes there are tokens with SHIP being the governance token and Ethra the business token. Ethra Invest a four year old company based in Dubai and they own 3 dry bulk vessels. They created a business before they launched a token so they had value backing the investment and not chasing value which is what others have done.
The token is already listed on BASE and is still very early as there is still so much more planned which I will explain how this all works. This caught my eye as this seems like a fun investment and yes there will be returns.
There are two different businesses involved here with one being the financing of vessels through token ownership. One vessel can cost anywhere between $30 and $150 million and these will be tokenized via staking and profits from the vessel paid as an APR. The other business is the blockchain platform providing data to the shipping industry which experts believe is where the real money lies and where the EthraSHIP token will be used.
The first business is waiting regulatory approval and there is no data on how this will pay out and will their be a share of profits from the revenue created by the vessel or vessels you invest into. Will there be specific investment pools for each ship purchased so there is plenty unknowns at this point in time.
The blockchain business will see customers having to pay for Data using the SHIP token and costs for ships registering their data. This is all still very early and definitely one to monitor.
There are a couple of other competitors that offer something similar like Shipfinex a London based shipping company that has started fractional ownership of it's vessels through tokenization. SHIPS is a Greek shipping company that offers RWA tokens for ship ownership paying the ship profits in stablecoins for your staking.
This kind of gives us a glimpse of where the future of RWA and tokens are heading and this is very different and quite exciting. This for myself is something I would get involved with because this is investing in an operational business and not on hype or hopium like we are doing with crypto. The idea you could invest in a vessel and profit from the vessels success earning a dividend or APR generating a passive income ticks my boxes.
Tokenization of RWA is going to unlock trillions of dollars in investments bringing so much new money flowing onto the blockchains. We are still so early with crypto and have been waiting patiently for many years and now we have this RWA waiting in the wings and blockchains have not even been adopted yet. There is big changes coming and with us already on the inside will create vast opportunities so we need to be wide awake sharing the information we uncover so we can all benefit as a community. That is how I am thinking and the hope is others feel the same way.