Ondo, the RWA tokenization leader, will end up as a Perp DEX
By Eric, Foresight News
The perpetual contract circuit is undergoing a quiet revolution.
Over the past two years, Perp DEX has grown from a marginal experiment to a force to be reckoned with in the derivatives market. The total trading volume of Perp DEX reached $7.9 trillion in 2025, close to 10% of the total trading volume of centralized exchanges. In the midst of this hustle and bustle at the time, a fundamental limitation always existed: almost all platforms were trapped in the cage of cryptographic native assets. The targets of transactions were nothing more than Bitcoin, Ethereum, and a few altcoins, and the collateral was almost a single stablecoin.
Meanwhile, the real-world asset (RWA) tokenization circuit is rising at an astonishing rate, from a proof of concept in 2023 to a market size of over $30 billion today. On this track, Ondo Finance has established an undisputed leading position: its tokenized stock platform Ondo Global Markets has a market share close to 70%, which is about 2.5 times that of second place.
Beginning this year, precious metals, commodities, and stocks began to be included in DEX's trading list. But the direction we're used to is for Perp DEX to launch tokenized RWA assets.
Things started getting interesting when the absolute leader of the RWA circuit decided to enter the Perp DEX space. The launch of Ondo Perps means that the perpetual contract circuit has finally seen a player who actually starts from traditional financial assets and deeply integrates institutional-grade asset issuance capabilities with cryptographic native trading infrastructure. This may mark a turning point in the evolution of Perp DEX from a pure cryptographic derivatives tool to a truly global asset trading infrastructure.
“Do the opposite”
In 2021, former Goldman Sachs employees Nathan Allman and Pinku Surana founded Ondo, initially positioned as a DeFi structured product agreement. From the end of 2022 to the beginning of 2023, the team keenly sensed that the DeFi internal circulation model will eventually reach the ceiling, and that the bridge connecting traditional finance with the on-chain world is the next real big opportunity. So they resolutely turned to the RWA circuit, launched OUSG, a tokenized US Treasury bond fund, and then launched USDY for non-US retail investors. These two products accurately penetrated the biggest pain point of the market at the time: the huge amount of money in the crypto world urgently needed to find low-risk, high-yield on-chain footholds, and the Federal Reserve's aggressive interest rate hike cycle made US Treasury bonds the most attractive choice.
Unfortunately, at the end of May, Nathan Allman, founder and CEO of Ondo and one of the main drivers of RWA's tokenization circuit, passed away unexpectedly, and long-term president Ian De Bode will take over as CEO. Ondo said Ian De Bode has been responsible for the company's strategy, products and day-to-day operations for more than two years, and his successor CEO has received full support from the management team.
Ondo's execution is impressive. In March 2024, when BlackRock launched BUIDL, a tokenized money market fund, Ondo quickly transferred OUSG's main holdings to BUIDL, leveraging credit endorsements from the world's largest asset management company while maintaining its independence in distribution channels. By 2025, Ondo's TVL surpassed $2.5 billion, with the USDY single product exceeding $1 billion, making it the world's largest tokenized treasury bond product for retail investors.
Meanwhile, the launch of Ondo Global Markets expanded the company's footprint from fixed income to equity assets. Launched in September 2025, the platform provides trading of more than 260 tokenized US stocks and ETFs. From Apple and Nvidia to the S&P 500 ETF, it covers popular sectors such as AI, biotech, defense, and energy. In less than eight months, the TVL broke 1 billion dollars, and the cumulative transaction volume exceeded 18 billion US dollars, which is a phenomenal growth rate in the history of any financial product. By contrast, none of the stablecoins showed such a steep adoption curve in the early stages.
More importantly, Ondo isn't just a crypto project operating in a grey area. It obtained regulatory approvals covering 30 European countries in Liechtenstein, secretly submitted registration statements to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and completed the first cross-border tokenized treasury bond redemption tests in collaboration with traditional financial giants such as J.P. Morgan Chase and Mastercard. When established asset management firms like Franklin Templeton chose to tokenize their ETF products through Ondo's platform, Ondo's pivotal position in the RWA space was self-evident.
This year, exchanges and DEXs are scrambling to launch tokenized RWA assets. Hyperliquid handled trading volumes including gold, silver, and crude oil over the weekend during the US-Iran war, leading Bloomberg to report on it twice in a week. This trend goes without saying, but everyone seems to be focusing on how exchanges can seize RWA tokenized assets, forgetting the potential to focus on the RWA tokenization project itself to launch the exchange itself.
Just before pump.fun launched DEX, DEXs on Solana were frantically grabbing the market for meme token trading. However, 13 months after pump.fun launched PumpSwap, PumpSwap's market share in terms of trading volume has reached second place, which is not much different from the first, with only 5% of Raydium's market share, which once dominated half of the market.
“Wall Street 2.0”
Ondo Perps's core positioning is clear: it's a perpetual futures platform focused on tokenizing stocks, indices, and commodities, combining an institutional-grade financial infrastructure with permissionless access to a global trading platform. Put more bluntly, it's a platform that brings Wall Street assets to the DeFi perpetual contract circuit in the true sense of the word.
The first and most intuitive differentiating advantage brought about by this positioning is the richness of the asset side. Ondo Perps can directly place Ondo's previously tokenized assets on Perp DEX for trading. For a trader who wants to use leverage flexibly in global asset allocation, this difference in choice space is qualitative.
Now that Ondo Perps is open to all users, let's take a look at some of the highlights:
As a Perp DEX, Ondo Perps has all the basic features, so I won't go into details. Currently, the maximum leverage supported by Ondo Perps is 20 times. Among them, most of the maximum leverage for US stock contracts is 10 times, and the maximum leverage for commodities, stock indices, etc. is 20 times.
Ondo Perps currently supports 24/7 trading on 24 perpetual contract markets, including:
16 US stocks: SPCX, MU, NVDA, TSLA, AAPL, MSFT, GOOGL, AMZN, META, NFLX, AMD, INTC, ORCL, PLTR, COIN, HOOD, MSTR, CRCL;
3 commodities: XAU (gold), XAG (silver), WTI (crude oil);
2 indices: US 500, US 100;
1 ETF: Roundhill Memory ETF (DRAM).
In actual use, the author discovered two characteristics. One is that users do not directly use their own wallets to trade, but instead need to transfer USDC on Ethereum to an address given by Ondo to trade; second, Ondo Perps uses a full position model, which means sharing security deposits for making long and short positions on different assets.
These designs actually correspond to longer-term plans. According to the information provided, Ondo Perps will use a multi-asset collateral system in the future. In addition to stablecoins, it will also support US stocks and US bond tokens launched by Ondo as margin to open positions. In this way, you can perform hedging and other operations without selling your own investment portfolio.
From a financial engineering perspective, multi-asset collateral not only adds a functional option; it actually restructures the risk calculation logic of the entire system. Ondo Perps is closer to the concept of portfolio margin (Portfolio Margin) in traditional finance, treating the entire asset portfolio as a unified risk pool. This means that natural hedging relationships between different assets can be automatically recognized by the system. For example, if you hold a tokenized SPY long and a S&P 500 perpetual contract short at the same time, the system can recognize this hedging and reduce margin requirements accordingly. Ordinary users may not understand its value, but it can actually serve complex quantitative strategies and base difference traders.
In terms of liquidity, Ondo Perps does not build a liquidity pool on the chain from scratch, but directly connects the on-chain market to traditional exchanges through the issuance and redemption mechanism of tokenized shares. This means that price discovery and depth of liquidity can be inherited from traditional trillion-dollar markets such as NASDAQ and NYSE, rather than relying on limited on-chain capital pools.
Arguably, the design of Ondo Perps not only meets the basic needs of ordinary investors, but also fully takes into account the needs of professional traders and institutional investors. Furthermore, Ondo Perps also claims that it is “the fastest permission-free perpetual contract trading platform,” where order routing, margin updates, and settlement are all processed in real time while maintaining decentralized security guarantees.
The balance between decentralization and user experience, and routing contract transactions directly to traditional financial exchanges, these two designs make Ondo need to collect funds, process order routing, transactions, and clearing off-chain, and distribute funds on-chain.
More than just trading
The flagship trading platform has always been Ondo's missing puzzle, and Perp DEX is actually a key part of RWA's closed loop of financialization.
Let's go back to the full picture of Ondo's business. On the one hand, Ondo Global Markets is responsible for issuing tokenized assets, transforming traditional securities such as US stocks, ETFs, and treasury bonds into tokens that can circulate freely on the blockchain. These tokenized assets naturally have two properties: they represent price exposure to underlying financial assets, and can also be used in combination in DeFi protocols like any ERC-20 token. But the problem is that if tokenized assets can only be “held,” then their value is far from being fully released.
On the other hand, with the relaxation of tokenization regulations in the US, currently cooperating with Ondo, platforms that use Ondo tokenized assets can choose to defy or issue their own tokenized products at any time. If you can't take control of the terminal's trading users, even the highest market share is just making a wedding dress for others.
The advent of Ondo Perps injected productivity into these tokenized assets. When a tokenized Apple stock can not only be held passively, but also used as margin to remove leveraged positions, implement complex base difference arbitrage strategies, and hedge portfolio risks, its financial properties are fully activated. This shift from a “yield asset” to a “credit base” is a necessary path for the entire RWA circuit from early adoption to mainstream financial infrastructure.
Looking further, what Ondo is actually building is a unified ecosystem spanning spot and derivatives, connecting traditional finance and the on-chain world. Tokenized stocks are issued on Ondo Global Markets, previously transferred across chains to Hyperliquid's HyperEVM and other ecosystems through Ondo Bridge, and can now be directly traded directly on Ondo Perps. Once this network effect is formed, it will be extremely difficult for competitors to replicate, because you can't replace a complete ecosystem that is already deeply embedded in multi-chain RWA infrastructure with just a better transaction interface.
In fact, this picture is already beginning to become a reality. Ondo has partnered with Chainlink to provide institutional-grade price oracles for its tokenized shares, enabling these assets to be used as collateral for the first time in the DeFi lending market. Integration with lending agreements such as Euler is progressing, and future traders can borrow funds without selling their positions. This “holding a position is capital” experience is a core value of the main broker business in traditional finance, and is now being moved to the chain by Ondo.
The era of new infrastructure
The launch of Ondo Perps, viewed from a broader perspective, is actually a product of the intersection of two historic trends: one is the inevitable process of RWA tokenization from edge experiments to mainstream financial infrastructure, and the other is a natural extension of Perp DEX's evolution from pure crypto derivatives instruments to trading platforms for all asset classes. Ondo is at the intersection of these two trends: it is the largest issuer on the RWA circuit, and has the deepest institutional financial partnerships and the broadest global regulatory framework.
For traders, Ondo Perps represents a new possibility: a platform where Nvidia shares can be used as margin, trade S&P 500 perpetual contracts on Sunday nights, and enjoy institutional liquidity and execution speed. This experience simply doesn't exist in traditional finance, nor is it available in existing DeFi. It belongs to a new world that is accelerating: the boundaries between traditional finance and cryptographic native infrastructure are gradually dissolving, and assets themselves have become pure financial building blocks that can be used anytime, anywhere, and in any combination.
This is probably what Ondo Perps really means. It's not just a new perpetual contract exchange; in Ondo's own words, it's a “next generation” platform that “brings traditional financial assets to the on-chain trading infrastructure.
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