Cloud Yachts, in partnership with Gregory C Marshall, Denison Yachting and Delta Marine, have brought to market the NFT superyacht build project in the form of $95,000,000 Project Metaverse. The project will be sold via a smart contract on the blockchain and be built by Delta Marine in the US. The project launches at Palm Beach International Boat Show on 24 March, we speak to the team at Cloud Yachts and Denison Yachting to understand how this project came to market and explore how this project differs from a typical build.

“Cloud Yachts approached us in late 2021 with a clever concept of minting our superyacht designs as NFTs. To our surprise, they sold 10 Greg Marshall NFTs priced at 1 ETH each during the 2022 Miami International Boat Show. Understanding we were on to something, I began thinking of ways to scale our business with Cloud Yachts,” starts Gregory Marshall. “We don't want to give away all our secrets but it was clear to make Project Metaverse real we would need a creative broker who not only has the clients but can also effectively communicate the experience and technology we are offering. Knowing Alex Clarke’s impressive superyacht sales history, we believe he is the guy for this monumental task. Maybe equally as important Alex purchased hull #1 of the Greg Marshall Miami NFT collection and from what Cloud Yachts tells me we have a duty to support my NFT holders.”

After successfully minting and selling the Gregory Marshall NFTs, the team began to explore the utility of NFTs and discovered how effective they are for storing all kinds of data points and information. The logical next step, therefore, was to use NFT and smart contract technology to sell and build a physical superyacht – and so Project Metaverse was conceived.

“It was really born out of a deep dive into what the realistic benefit was of creating an NFT and managing data through it for a superyacht build. We realised that you can contain a lot of data points that would traditionally be housed all over the place,” explains Zach Mandelstein, founder of Cloud Yachts. “It seemed like a great opportunity to complete your traditional superyacht build, but with a smart contract in front of the IP, sketches, developments, stage payments and so on.”

For a more in-depth look at the world of crypto transactions, tokenisation and physical assets, click here.

The big unknown, according to Mandelstein, is what the value of the NFT will be once the superyacht is built. The NFT world is broad and relatively complex, with NFTs being used for everything from digital art to the ownership of physical assets. While the Cloud Yachts’ team contends that in this example there is an element of both, it seems more than likely that the NFT will be inextricably linked to the ownership of the built vessel itself, given that most owners, especially those spending $95,000,000 on a superyacht, would be willing to relinquish the IP to their own project.

“Primarily we are using the NFT as a tool to improve the superyacht build process, however, we do not yet know what the residual value of the NFT will be once the project is completed,” continues Mandelstein. “Is it sold as an NFT again? Is it non-divisible and a true non-fungible token? What we do know is that the project will be tokenised because we won’t be accepting $95,000,000 in a single Ethereum payment for the project, we will still be using stage payments and so on, but these stages will each have their own NFTs with unique data. It may be that the initial payment comes with the design and the second with CAD drawings and so on, although this is clearly a simplified image of the process.”

“When I first heard about the Gregory Marshall NFT new build project I knew I had to be involved as I feel this will be a ground-breaking project and implement a shift in the way yachts are built and sold. I immediately reached out to Greg and expressed my interest. Seeing the end result with his last project Artefact you can’t help but feel this will be equally epic,“ adds Alex Clarke of Denison Yachting. “Greg spent seven years as the mastermind behind ARTEFACT - which won every major award in 2021 - so I asked him, ‘where do you go from here?’ and he said, ‘the metaverse.’. That's all I needed to hear. I am beyond excited to help pioneer this revolutionary new build process with Gregory Marshall Naval Architects, Delta Marine and Cloud Yachts. I am optimistic Denison Yachting will play an important role in locating a buyer as excited to be part of the Project Metaverse experience as we are.”

As the name suggests there is a metaverse component to the project. The aim is to build the equivalent superyacht within the metaverse and allow clients to customise the project within the metaverse using augmented reality technology, which Marshall has personally invested in the development of the necessary technology.

Project Metaverse is the first of its kind in the superyacht world, however, it will almost certainly not be the last. With various stakeholders now taking an increasingly keen interest in the worlds of blockchain, crypto and NFTs it is only a matter of time before such projects become more common.

Profile links

Gregory C. Marshall Naval Architect Ltd

Delta Marine

Denison Yacht Sales

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