Part 1: Setting Sail, Tokenizing Time and Turning Yachts into Yield

We’re not building a luxury club. We’re building the next infrastructure layer for access, experience, and yield, starting with yachts and ending (maybe) in orbit.

Apr 11, 2025

Looking to navigate and invest in the age of Web3? Visit Nautilus for expert guidance and support in this rapidly evolving ecosystem. Stay updated in real-time by following Tom Serres on X.com or LinkedIn.

This four-part series (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4) is both an exploration of tokenized real-world assets and a working blueprint. Marcus and I, co-creators of the Mustaa protocol, are thinking out loud as we build a system designed to turn underused real-world assets into accessible, yield-generating platforms layered with experience-as-a-service and just enough magic to make logistics feel luxurious. We’ll break down how fixed-supply tokens coordinate time, how tranching enables shared ownership, how non-owners access time and experiences through market-driven utility, and how charter treasuries and vessel-level P&Ls turn access into real revenue. All of it is coordinated by decentralized AI agents doing the hard stuff: routing, provisioning, maintenance, concierge, and maybe even making your dinner reservations.

Mustaa starts with yachts, but the same mechanics apply to jets, helicopters, villas, and if we don’t get too carried away, orbital meditation pods. It’s about unlocking participation, rescuing stranded assets, and turning capital that just sits there into capital that actually does something.

Follow along at Mustaa.io, subscribe to Mustaa Horizon on Substack, or find us on X and LinkedIn as we build and share the future in public.

The Yacht That Never Moves

Somewhere in the Mediterranean, a yacht is sleeping. It’s not broken. It’s not forgotten. It’s just… there. Floating in place like a marble bathtub with sails, silently absorbing maintenance fees while the owner fires off a half-hearted email to someone in Dubai about a dry-aged beef startup that definitely doesn’t need to exist. No one is aboard. No one is arriving. The Bluetooth-enabled wine fridge is fully stocked, but tragically unopened. It hums softly in the background, like a ghost waiting to serve a crisp rosé that no one will drink.

This isn’t rare. It’s the rule. Jets are idling on tarmacs like dogs who forgot what they were chasing. Villas sit untouched for three seasons out of the year, their infinity pools slowly filling with leaves and existential dread. Ski chalets exist in a kind of luxurious hibernation, slumbering under their custom cedar beams while their owners debate which of their three teenagers is “emotionally ready for altitude.” These aren’t broken assets. These are stranded assets. Objects of immense value, beauty, and potential, completely sidelined by logistical inertia.

Somewhere, probably in Ibiza, maybe in Miami, almost definitely parked next to a guy named Theo who only wears linen and refers to himself as a "venture whisperer", there’s a $4.8 million yacht sitting completely idle. It has a Bluetooth wine fridge, two salaried ghost crew members, and more Italian leather than a Milanese mafia wedding. But no one is using it. Again.

And this isn’t some rogue anomaly. This is the operating system for wealth. Whether it’s a yacht, a villa, a jet, or a climate-controlled garage filled with motorcycles that haven't been started since Obama left office, there’s a staggering amount of real-world stuff just… sitting. Not earning. Not being used. And absolutely not creating any value for anyone who doesn’t already have a trust fund, a vitamin IV drip subscription, and a therapist who specializes in “post-liquidity angst.”

These assets aren’t lonely because people don’t want to use them. They’re lonely because the system to access them is broken. Or worse, it's ancient. The few people who do gain access usually have to survive a gauntlet of outdated logistics: a dozen Excel spreadsheets, six group chats filled with passive-aggressive emoji reactions, and at least one emotionally scarring scheduling blood feud that ends with someone dramatically texting, “Fine. Take Labor Day. I hope it rains.”

The tragedy isn’t that these assets are exclusive. It’s that they’re structurally inaccessible. Locked up not just by cost, but by coordination. And while they look like status symbols, they behave like productivity sinkholes. Beautiful, expensive, sometimes carbon-belching, but more than anything, logistically alone.

And that’s where this story begins. Not with the fantasy of ownership, but with the reality of underuse. Not with making more things, but with unlocking the ones we already have.

Ancient Tools for a Modern Problem

Let’s be fair, shared access to physical assets is not a new idea. Timeshares have been around since disco, complete with vaguely tropical brochures and the lingering emotional residue of a thousand awkward family brunches. Airbnb lets us sleep in strangers’ houses, sometimes voluntarily, sometimes because we didn’t read the reviews closely enough and now we’re cuddling with a cat named Linda who wasn’t listed under amenities. Concierge services exist. Charter brokers exist. And somewhere out there, cousin Brian is still running a 14-person “co-ownership spreadsheet” with color-coded tabs and a terrifying grasp of passive-aggressive formatting.

The point is, the concept of shared use exists, but the tools are from a different era. Most of them feel like they were developed in a time when faxes were futuristic and Blockbuster had a business model. You’ve got outdated contracts, manual processes, trust-based verbal agreements, and group chats that collapse under the psychic weight of scheduling a single weekend in July. These systems are clunky, opaque, and deeply allergic to optimization. They weren’t built to scale. They weren’t built to share. And they definitely weren’t built with tokenized incentives, smart contracts, or AI-driven logistics in mind.

Sometimes, using these systems feels like attending a secret club where the entry requirement is unresolved trauma with Microsoft Excel. There are people out there still printing their boarding passes and thinking Venmo is crypto. And if you want to share an asset with someone who isn’t in your zip code or family tree, good luck. You’ll be buried in CCs, trapped in a calendar civil war, and one emotional misfire away from writing, “Fine. Take the yacht for New Year’s. I hope you get norovirus.”

This isn’t a diss track. It’s just a reality check. These systems did the job for a while. But like most legacy software, they’re overdue for an upgrade. And not the kind of upgrade where you slap a sleeker logo on top of the same old mess and call it “next-gen.” I’m talking about an actual protocol-level reimagination, an infrastructure layer designed for programmable access, tokenized coordination, composable services, and real-world yield that doesn’t require psychic intuition to calculate.

This isn’t about blowing things up for the sake of being disruptive. We’re not Luddites with a whitepaper and a Twitter thread. We’re builders looking at a very real problem, a mountain of underutilized assets trapped in analog systems, and saying: maybe it’s time we gave this whole thing an upgrade. One that actually works across geography, across ownership structures, and across time.

And that’s where Mustaa comes in. Not as a luxury club or a brand with moodboard aesthetics and a concierge named Ashleigh. Mustaa is a protocol. An infrastructure layer for turning real-world assets into programmable, accessible, and yield-generating experiences. A platform that replaces chaos with composability. And one that starts, not with yachts, but with how we coordinate the future.

Making Time Fungible

So here’s the idea. Instead of treating an asset like a fixed trophy you occasionally dust off and brag about in group chats, what if we treated it like a programmable calendar with revenue potential? A container for coordinated experiences, not just a thing that sits there waiting for permission slips and maintenance bills. What if the value of a yacht wasn’t measured in fiberglass and fuel receipts, but in how well we could schedule, optimize, and monetize the time it offers?

With Mustaa, that’s exactly the reframing. Each asset, take a yacht, for instance, is broken down into one million fungible time tokens per year. These tokens represent the most fundamental layer of access: time. Each token corresponds to a fractional unit of the calendar. When someone uses time on the vessel, the tokens are burned. When the year ends, a fresh set of tokens is minted, and the cycle starts again. No inflation. No arbitrary unlocks. Just clean, fixed-supply economics anchored to the real-world physics of how much time an asset can be used in a year. There are only so many days in the season, only so many hours in the day. The calendar doesn’t lie, and now it doesn’t leak value either.

Owners receive their share of the year’s supply based on their ownership tranche, effectively giving them rights to book time or trade it. But here’s where things get more interesting: any unallocated or forfeited tokens are released to the open market. Anyone can buy them. Anyone can use them. You don’t have to be an owner, or even know an owner, or have ever made eye contact with someone who owns a boat. Time, in this system, is permissionless.

And like any good market, the value of that time fluctuates. If you’re trying to book during peak season in Mykonos, the week where everything is sold out and the only thing hotter than the sand is the collective thirst for status, the token cost for that time will spike. But if it’s mid-October and the harbor’s only other guests are AI-generated influencers and crypto dads reevaluating their life choices, the token price drops. This is real-time, real-world supply and demand, abstracted into programmable time utility. No more flat rates or arbitrary pricing. Just markets doing what markets do best: surfacing value based on collective behavior.

This is the subtle but seismic shift. We’re not just tokenizing ownership, we’re tokenizing utility. Access becomes liquid. Scheduling becomes trustless. Value becomes dynamic. And maybe most importantly, you don’t need to own a yacht to experience one. You just need the right amount of time tokens and a protocol that knows what to do with them.

The mechanics are elegantly simple, but the implications are enormous. Because if time can be sliced, tokenized, and traded, then anything with a calendar becomes programmable. And when you start seeing time itself as the native currency of access, everything else begins to click: pricing models, yield mechanics, even the potential for experiences to be composed across multiple assets, coordinated across owners and non-owners, all orchestrated through token flows and smart contracts that don't need to ask permission.

Time, in this model, is no longer something you fight over. It’s something you acquire, allocate, or earn, and ultimately, something you can make work for you.

Ownership Gets Smarter

Of course, someone still needs to own the asset. The yacht doesn’t tokenize itself, and the marina won’t accept vibes as payment, yet. Yeah, sorry, Viber coders. You might be vibe coding your way through life, but until someone writes an EIP for “emotional frequency staking,” you’ll still need actual ownership infrastructure. That’s where Mustaa’s second layer comes into play, tokenized ownership through non-fungible tokens. And no, these aren’t your average JPEG monkeys in sailor hats. These NFTs aren’t art. They’re agreements. Cryptographically secured, on-chain representations of real-world ownership with teeth.

Each one encodes everything you'd expect in a modern ownership structure, governance rights, financial entitlements, usage privileges, maintenance history, and full provenance records. It’s like getting a title deed, shareholder agreement, maintenance log, and onboard vibe calendar all wrapped into a single digital artifact that behaves like it actually knows what it’s doing. If you hold one, you’re not just an owner; you’re embedded in the asset’s operating system.

Ownership doesn’t have to mean sole control anymore. You can co-own with friends, business partners, or that one finance-savvy aunt who somehow always finds the best hidden beach spots and knows how to reset the router without calling support. You could structure it through your family office. Or, if you’re feeling bold and mildly unstable, you could form a minidao with your Discord friends who just went in on a catamaran and are now passionately debating whether the onboard AI should default to ambient techno or Taylor Swift’s Folklore.

And yes, your group might even include that guy, the eccentric European billionaire who wears only silk kaftans, microdoses for “intuition expansion,” and insists that the yacht feels sad when docked too long. He might cry during governance votes. That’s fine. The protocol doesn’t care. It just runs.

What makes this powerful is how it removes the drama from group ownership. No more spreadsheets, no more annual holiday negotiations that turn into Cold War simulations, and no more strategic texting wars to claim “the good week.” The token knows. The contract enforces. Everyone’s rights and access windows are transparently defined, and everyone plays by the same rulebook, which, mercifully, is not written in Excel and powered by unresolved family trauma.

Ownership becomes modular. It becomes composable. It becomes liquid. If your circumstances change, you can sell or transfer your stake without unraveling a group chat or triggering a spontaneous group therapy session. You’re holding a programmable ownership object, not a bureaucratic mess wrapped in emotional complexity and inherited resentment.

And maybe most importantly, it’s fair. Not just in spirit, but in structure. You see who owns what. You know what rights come with that ownership. You know how the asset performs, because the data lives on-chain, not in a mysterious PDF hidden behind a broker’s “sent from iPhone” signature.

So yeah. Ownership gets smarter. And, thankfully, it also gets a hell of a lot less annoying.

Looking to navigate and invest in the age of Web3? Visit Nautilus for expert guidance and support in this rapidly evolving ecosystem. Stay updated in real-time by following Tom Serres on X.com or LinkedIn.

Monetizing the Unused

But what happens when you don’t use your time? Maybe you’re on sabbatical. Maybe you’re deep in the Ecuadorian jungle rediscovering your purpose via ayahuasca and a well-meaning but disorganized shaman named Kevin. Maybe you’re writing a novel about ethical AI in a treehouse with no Wi-Fi but excellent feng shui. Whatever the reason, your tokens sit idle, gathering digital dust. And in traditional systems, that unused access just evaporates, wasted, forgotten, or worse, held onto out of spite like the world’s most passive-aggressive calendar entry.

But in Mustaa, idle time doesn’t die. It gets recycled. Token holders, aka owners, can return any unused or forfeited time tokens to the vessel’s Charter Treasury. From there, the protocol makes those tokens available to non-owners on the open market, pricing them according to supply and demand, seasonality, and other market factors. The original owner, in turn, receives a proportional share of the yield generated from those bookings. It’s like renting out your beach house, but without the psychological stress of wondering whether someone is cooking shrimp in the fireplace or trying to use your bidet as a wine cooler.

The process is smooth, permissionless, and fully automated. There’s no negotiation, no awkward “hey, are you still using that week?” texts, no elaborate guilt-tripping rituals from group chat veterans who think they’re the emotional compass of the crew. The contract handles it. The treasury accounts for it. You get paid. Everyone wins. Even Kevin, the shaman, might finally get a long weekend on a yacht he didn’t have to manifest.

What this mechanism unlocks is deceptively powerful. Because in most systems, value is only generated when something is actively used. But Mustaa flips that on its head, non-use becomes a yield-bearing event. By turning unused time into circulating access, the system expands availability, boosts asset performance, and aligns incentives across every participant in the network. Owners gain passive yield. Non-owners get market-based access. And the asset itself gets to stretch its legs a bit, instead of floating around like a depressed billionaire’s midlife crisis project.

This is how ownership starts to blur into something more flexible, less about possession and more about participation. It’s not just your time anymore. It’s the network’s time. You’re still the owner, sure, but now you’re also a contributor to a larger economy of experience, where access, coordination, and yield are continuously rebalanced by smart contracts and protocol incentives.

In that world, every hour of unused access becomes an opportunity. And every participant plays a role in keeping the calendar constantly in motion, compounding value in ways the old systems never could.

Beyond the Boat

Behind all of this sits smart contract infrastructure that does the thing legacy systems never could: coordinate access without friction. It handles scheduling, enforces token burn mechanics, respects ownership rights, and maintains governance protocols. If you hold the token, you get the time. If someone else books it before you, the smart contract locks it in. No ambiguity. No favoritism. No awkward phone calls with that one guy who thinks he’s entitled to July every year because he “had a vision” during Burning Man. Just clear, programmable coordination enforced on-chain, like calendar justice served cold.

This is where the real power of the model starts to emerge. Because what we’re talking about isn’t just a booking platform or a better version of fractional ownership. It’s a coordination engine, one that treats time as an asset, experiences as services, and participants as nodes in an ecosystem instead of passive renters or opaque stakeholders.

And the best part? It’s not just for yachts.

The very same mechanics can apply to a ski villa in the Alps, a surf lodge in Baja, a fleet of jets grounded most of the week in Aspen, or a mountaintop retreat in Norway offering glacial sound baths and fermented moss smoothies. The logic is portable. The model is abstractable. Anywhere there’s an asset with a calendar and downtime, this protocol can step in and turn that unused time into access, revenue, and composable experience.

Even space. Yes, space.

Should physics and regulatory sanity cooperate, no promises, we may soon be reserving 90-minute silent meditations in low-orbit space pods, watching Earth spin below us like a distracted parent who forgot your birthday but Venmo’d you $100 anyway. Are we joking? Kind of. But also, not really. When access becomes programmable and experience becomes composable, what once sounded absurd starts to feel like infrastructure waiting to happen.

Because in the end, this isn’t just about upgrading yachts. It’s about reimagining how we allocate time, how we coordinate participation, and how we extract real yield from real assets, no matter how grounded, remote, or hilariously futuristic they may be.

And it all starts by realizing the boat was just the beginning.

The Real Shift

This isn’t about making luxury more accessible. That’s a branding exercise, and frankly, a pretty tired one. “Luxury, but for everyone” usually ends up being “still exclusive, but now with a podcast.” What we’re building isn’t an ad campaign. It’s an infrastructure shift, a system that moves us from static possession to coordinated utility. From idle, underperforming assets to programmable, yield-bearing infrastructure. From exclusivity and chaos to transparency, access, and network participation.

Mustaa isn’t a lifestyle brand pretending to be a protocol. It’s a protocol that understands lifestyle. That means it’s built to support real-world use, yes, but it’s also built to accommodate spontaneity, shared experience, beautiful logistics, and the ability to book a boat on a Wednesday because your soul told you to. Access becomes a programmable layer. Experience becomes a tokenized product. And yield? Yield becomes the connective tissue that holds the entire system together, a byproduct of design, not marketing.

This is the real shift. Ownership becomes modular. Participation becomes liquid. And suddenly, time and access are assets that can be coordinated by anyone, not just a small class of people with concierge phone numbers and a frightening amount of Amex points. We're not asking for permission from the legacy systems. We’re building something they never imagined.

And in that spirit, Part 2 takes us one step further. We’re going to walk through a week in the life of a tokenized asset and see what happens when real-world logistics are run by decentralized agents. Pricing, routing, provisioning, scheduling, it’s all managed in real time by AI systems working quietly in the background like an orchestra with no conductor and no drama. It’s not just about using the yacht. It’s about watching it perform, like a self-orchestrating, yield-bearing, token-powered organism with decent taste in music and an allergy to inefficiency.

And yes, there will be kombucha. Possibly served by an AI named Linda who also moonlights as your provisioning assistant, sound therapist, and weather oracle.

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