Real Maritime Assets (RMA)

Tokenizing real-world ships into on-chain investment opportunities.
RMA connects stablecoins, ship RWAs, and governance to open ship finance to private investors.

Ships as Real World Assets (RWA), funded by private investors, settled in our own stablecoin.

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1. Inspiration

The maritime industry has been a major global sector for over 100 years, and it continues to grow.
It includes shipbuilding, shipping, port operations, and more — but we focused on shipbuilding and ship finance.

Today, when a company wants to build a ship:

• It relies on banks, governments, and large institutions.
• Private investors have almost no way to participate.
• There are no real policies or platforms that support small-ticket funding.

We wanted to solve this.

Our goal:
Tokenize expensive ships as RWAs, break them into smaller units so that anyone can invest with small amounts,
and build a transparent, decentralized ecosystem around them.

On top of that:

• Investors can receive dividends from ship profits.
• Dual Layer Tokens (DLT) allow multiple benefit layers (securities, memberships, free boarding tickets, etc.).
• All RWA transactions are settled in our own stablecoin, which is linked to a governance token.

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2. What RMA Does

RMA is a platform that intermediates between private investors and shipping companies,
connecting them through three core on-chain processes:

1. Stablecoin
2. RWA (tokenized ships on Dual Layer Token)
3. Governance

2.1 Stablecoin

RMA uses a crypto-collateralized stablecoin:

• Users deposit Ether as collateral and mint stablecoins.
• For every 100 stablecoins issued, the user receives 1 governance token.
• Chainlink Data Feeds are used to:
  • Fetch collateral prices
  • Calculate liquidation prices
• Chainlink Automation runs at regular intervals:
  • Checks whether a user’s position should be liquidated.
  • If the collateral price drops below the threshold:
    • The user’s collateral is sold.
    • The user receives the remaining value minus the issued stablecoins and fees.

2.2 RWA (Tokenized Ships)

Each shipping company deploys one RWA contract per ship:

• When raising funds to build a new ship, the contract mints RWA tokens.
• These RWA tokens are implemented on Dual Layer Token (DLT):
  • One parent ship RWA can mint multiple child tokens:
    • Securities: share in future profits (dividends)
    • Memberships: access rights, loyalty benefits
    • Free boarding tickets: usable as NFT tickets
• Ship metadata can be updated via Chainlink Functions:
  • For example: updating with weather data or other external APIs.

2.3 Governance

Governance tokens are obtained through stablecoin issuance:

• If a user holds a certain amount of governance tokens, they can:
  • Create proposals
  • Vote on key protocol parameters
• Governance can change:
  • Stablecoin fees
  • Liquidation ratios
  • Other risk parameters of the system

This closes the loop:

Stablecoin ↔ Governance Token ↔ Governance Contract ↔ RWA Funding

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3. How We Built It

• Smart Contracts

  • Solidity
  • Foundry toolkit
  • Remix (rapid prototyping and demos)

• Chainlink Products

  • Data Feeds (price oracles)
  • Automation (liquidation checks)
  • Functions (off-chain / API data → on-chain metadata updates)

• Chain

  • Ethereum Sepolia Testnet

• Frontend

  • Next.js
  • Tailwind CSS
  • ethers.js

• Backend

  • Node.js
  • MySQL

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4. Challenges We Ran Into

4.1 Understanding the Maritime Industry

The maritime industry was completely new to us:

• We knew almost nothing about shipbuilding or ship finance.
• We had to invest a lot of time in domain research, not just coding.
• As technologists, this was a very different kind of “study” — but it was necessary to build a realistic product.

In the end, it helped us design a more grounded and meaningful use case.

4.2 Stablecoin Design

Designing the stablecoin was like studying economics + math + DeFi at the same time:

• We researched different types of stablecoins:
  • Overcollateralized, algorithmic, etc.
• We studied key concepts such as:
  • Liquidation ratio
  • Debt repayment
  • Collateral value
• Then we had to translate these concepts into code:
  • Mathematical formulas
  • State transitions
  • Liquidation flows

It took a lot of time and calculation, but it made our stablecoin truly our own, not a copy.

4.3 RWA Implementation (ERC-6960)

We wanted our RWA design to be more than just ERC-20 or ERC-721:

• A simple token didn’t feel exciting or flexible enough.
• During our research, we found ERC-6960, which supports a dual-layer structure.
• This allowed us to:
  • Tokenize a ship once.
  • Issue multiple token types (securities, memberships, tickets) under the same parent RWA.

This multi-layer structure felt like a perfect fit for complex real-world assets like ships.

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5. Accomplishments We’re Proud Of

We have created a small but powerful RMA ecosystem:

• We connected:
  • Stablecoin,
  • Governance token,
  • Governance mechanism,
  • RWA contracts
    into one coherent platform.
• Our stablecoin implementation is:
  • Entirely our own design
  • Not cloned from any existing stablecoin
• For the RWA contracts:
  • We didn’t just use ERC-6960 “as is”.
  • We extended it with features we needed for the maritime use case.
  • We plan to contribute our improvements back to the EIP.

We are especially proud of the RMAStablecoin.sol contract —
it was written with extreme care and attention to detail.

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6. What We Learned

6.1 Chainlink

Before writing code, we spent time studying:

• Chainlink whitepapers
• The architecture of the Decentralized Oracle Network (DON)
• How its products (Data Feeds, Automation, Functions) fit together

We also noticed how much Chainlink evolved compared to a year ago
—for example, Automation became easier to use (no more registering specific functions manually).

6.2 Frontend

This hackathon was also our chance to learn Next.js:

• We built the frontend under time pressure, in a somewhat “messy” way.
• But this is part of the learning process:
  • Integrating contracts with React/Next.js
  • Handling wallet connections
  • Rendering complex RWA & stablecoin states

We also deepened our understanding of blockchain UX.

6.3 Smart Contracts

Our main personal goal was to get much better at Solidity:

• We became more comfortable with:
  • Interfaces
  • Contract modularization
  • Even some inline assembly
• Contracts are no longer intimidating to us.
• We feel like we made a significant leap in our Web3 engineering skills.

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7. What’s Next for Real Maritime Assets (RMA)

1. Deploy to Mainnet (or Production-Ready Network)

   • We want to refine and deploy RMA so users can actually invest in tokenized ships.

2. Contract Refactoring

   • We plan to clean up and optimize parts of the codebase
     (except for RMAStablecoin.sol, which is already highly polished).

3. CCIP Integration

   • We learned how to move ERC-20 and ERC-721 across chains,
     but we couldn’t complete it for DLT in this hackathon.
   • Cross-chain RWA support via Chainlink CCIP remains a major milestone.

4. Frontend Improvements

   • Compared to the contracts, our frontend is still behind:
     • More pages and flows are needed.
     • We ended up demoing some flows with Remix, which was a bit disappointing.
   • We’re committed to:
     • Completing all planned pages
     • Connecting them fully to the contracts
     • Providing a smoother UX for investors and shipping companies.

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8. Built With

• Smart Contracts

  • Solidity
  • Foundry
  • Remix

• Chainlink

  • Data Feeds
  • Automation
  • Functions

• Blockchain

  • Ethereum Sepolia Testnet

• Frontend

  • Next.js
  • Tailwind CSS
  • ethers.js

• Backend

  • Node.js
  • MySQL