That's just one reason. The assets would essentially be permanent. If the code was released people (Or a new organization) could run servers with the code and honor the assets. Other reasons for doing this are that it makes items more easily tradeable (you could trade them cell phone to cell phone. Another reason is monetization for star citizen. I'm not sure what their long term strategy is but this is a potential revenue source if they issue a token that is tradable on real life exchanges. It's basically a way of taking a virtual item and transforming it into a digital asset that cannot be duplicated. Which is kind of cool. It also means that automatic forms of escrow are possible where several parties are all involved in having signatures determining the flow of assets.

edit: there are other monetization opportunities here as well. Imagine if you could turn your ship into an asset that could live outside of the game itself which is what we are talking about here. In turn if Star citizen decided to partner with someone... say they partnered with chipotle and said anyone who owns a ship that has been in so many battles (or something) can get a discount on guacamole. The ship would be cryptographically verifiable and it would be doable from a smart phone.