The problem ShipYield solves

Maritime assets like cargo ships are large, capital‑intensive, and extremely illiquid, which means only big institutions can typically participate in ship finance and secondary trading is slow and opaque. Ship owners looking for capital often rely on complex debt structures, bank syndicates, or private equity, all of which come with high friction, long negotiations, and limited transparency for investors. At the same time, there is growing demand in DeFi and RWA for yield-bearing products that are backed by real cash flows, not just on-chain leverage or purely speculative tokens.

ShipYield addresses these gaps by turning a cargo ship into a yield‑bearing NFT collection, where each NFT represents roughly 200 USD of fractional economic exposure to the vessel and its revenue stream. This makes ship finance accessible to smaller investors, improves liquidity via on‑chain secondary markets, and automates monthly yield distribution to NFT holders through smart contracts, creating a transparent, programmable “maritime income” asset class.

Challenges I ran into

I implemented most of the project using an AI‑assisted IDE for the coding and an AI design assistant for generating visual assets and refining the UX copy. The workflow was surprisingly smooth, but it still required me to carefully validate contract logic, front‑end state flows, and asset usage rather than just accepting AI output as‑is. The main challenge was learning how to “orchestrate” these tools effectively: breaking down tasks into small prompts, keeping the architecture consistent across multiple files, and iterating quickly without losing track of the overall product vision for ShipYield.

Use of AI tools and agents

I integrated AI tools directly into the development and design workflow to move faster and explore the problem space more deeply:

Cursor with Composer 1.5

Used as an AI‑assisted IDE to scaffold the smart contract architecture (collection factory, NFT contracts, yield distributor) and the basic front‑end structure (pages for collection creation, marketplace, collection detail, user dashboard, and yield claim).

Leveraged it to iterate on TypeScript/React and Solidity patterns quickly, refactor components, and enforce consistent patterns for state management and contract interaction, which is especially helpful when dealing with multiple contracts (collection, treasury, yield) and user flows.

Nanobanana for image and logos generation