Tokenized stocks are rapidly gaining ground, and Ian de Bode, President of Ondo Finance believes they are becoming one of the most practical and scalable use cases for cryptocurrencies.
The firm said its tokenized stock platform, called Ondo Global Markets, has raised more than $500 million in total value locked and recorded more than $7 billion in volume since its launch in September 2025. It is now the largest by size among providers, leading ahead of Kraken issuers xStocks and Robinhood, data from RWA.xyz shows. The overall equity token market is just shy of $1 billion, growing 27% over the last month alone.
Before that, Ondo started with tokenized US Treasuries and is now the leading issuer with over $2 billion in total assets.
While tokenization attempts increasingly include alternative assets such as real estate or private credit, Ondo is now focused on stocks and ETFs with strong price discovery, deep liquidity and clear valuation, de Bode said in an interview with CoinDesk. De Bode will speak at CoinDesk’s Consensus Miami this May.
“You tokenize something for ease of access or to use it as collateral,” de Bode said. “The shares fit both and are priced as assets that people really understand, unlike a building in Manhattan.”
Ondo issues tokenized notes backed by shares held through clearing brokers. These tokens move freely through wallets like stablecoins, with users only requiring KYC at the minting stage. That structure allows assets to be traded on decentralized finance (DeFi) venues, where other tokenized equity models often struggle due to transfer restrictions or illiquid funds.
A major advantage, De Bode argued, is instant minting and burning, allowing large investors to trade millions of dollars in tokenized stocks at prices that reflect their brokerage account, without premiums or slippage. One investor, he said, minted Google stock tokens worth $17 million.
That mechanism has attracted users in Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America, as well as crypto-native investors who want to switch between cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. and Google shares without leaving your wallet.
But liquidity still declines on weekends, de Bode said. Crypto markets and decentralized finance (DeFi) operate 24/7, while traditional finance (TradFi) operates Monday to Friday. That mismatch makes hedging difficult for equity token market makers.
That could change if the NYSE and Nasdaq move forward with their plans to support 24/7 trading in tokenized stocks, effectively synchronizing the TradFi and DeFi clocks, de Bode said.
“If TradFi becomes 24/7, it will be a blessing,” he said. “It’s our biggest bottleneck.”
Ondo’s focus this year is to expand its global markets platform, adding hundreds more assets, integrating with new blockchains, and boosting crypto exchanges looking to compete with retail brokers.
“Our goal is not to compete with the stock markets,” de Bode said. “We power them. Think of us as the Tether of stocks.”
