Late 2024. After BorderDollar shut down, Kenneth and I joined forces with a veteran maritime operator and his VC to build cross-border payments for the maritime industry. We were growing fast. We shut it down because the co-founder relationship broke down completely.
context
BorderDollar was our first attempt at maritime fintech. When it shut down in December 2024, the insight stayed: maritime cross-border payments are genuinely broken. Telegraphic transfers take 2–7 days. Fees run up to 0.7% per transaction. When payments get stuck at an intermediary bank for an RFI, there's zero visibility — and the downstream cascading effects are catastrophic in a supply chain where a delayed port fee can hold up a ship.
The maritime industry moves 80% of the world's goods. The $100 billion ship agent and port services segment — $25,000 per port call × 4,000,000 port calls globally — is the entry point with the highest payment frequency and the least tolerance for delays.
We'd already validated the core mechanic at the ETHKL 2024 hackathon, where we built Borderless and won the Manta Network prize for tokenizing maritime supply chain payments.
the team and the deal
After BorderDollar, Kenneth and I joined forces with a maritime operator who ran a port agent SaaS — he already had real payment volumes flowing through his network. His VC backed the venture. The proposition was clean: we bring the fintech and blockchain infrastructure, he brings the distribution and the existing customer base.
The idea was to leverage those existing volumes as the wedge — rather than cold-starting from scratch, thirdLyr would flow into payment relationships that were already happening.
what we built
thirdLyr was a Layer-3 blockchain built on Arbitrum Orbit, purpose-built for atomic cross-border transactions in maritime trade. The tagline: turning cost into yield.
The core mechanic:
- Ship agents prefund their wallet with fiat
- thirdLyr on-ramps fiat into USDC and stakes it in staking pools
- Staked funds earn 3–5% p.a. yield while sitting idle
- When an invoice arrives, thirdLyr unstakes the relevant amount and sends it to a destination wallet
- The money is off-ramped via a partner exchange and fiat-transferred directly to the port service's bank account
The result: instant settlement instead of 3–5 days. Negative effective transaction cost once yield is factored in. Cashback on top.
The architecture had three layers:
- Layer-3 Execution Environment — smart contract execution on Arbitrum Orbit, inheriting Ethereum's security while optimizing for maritime-specific logic
- Data Availability Committee (DAC) — cryptographic data anchoring for trade documents, using an enhanced AnyTrust model with commit-reveal and staking-based slashing
- Decentralized Data Storage (DDS) — RaptorQ erasure coding for fault-tolerant storage of bills of lading, compliance records, and payment receipts
The THIRD token served as the native utility and gas token — burnable to offset transaction fees, used to reward DAC nodes and storage providers, and serving as the governance token for protocol upgrades.
The roadmap had three phases: decentralized data storage → maritime oracle (aggregating AIS tracking, SGTradeX, port authority data, banking APIs for automated payments) → on-chain credit scoring and AI-driven payment agents.
We published a technical whitepaper in February 2025.
traction
The first two months were strong. We were moving. The existing payment network gave us real customers to talk to, real volumes to target, and a credible story for investors. We were seeking $10M in seed funding.
Phase 1 projections: USD$159,000 in GTV in the first quarter alone, scaling toward USD$1.17M total volume by end of 2025.
what happened
The co-founder relationship didn't hold.
Kenneth and I had significant friction with the maritime operator and his VC. The working dynamic was genuinely difficult — the kind of friction that doesn't resolve, it compounds. We departed on unamicable terms.
thirdLyr shut down.
The thesis was right. The market was real. The payment problem in maritime is still unsolved. What didn't survive was the team.