Tokenized shares are gaining ground fast – and Ian de Bode, president at Ondo Finance believe they are becoming one of the most practical and scalable use cases for crypto.
The firm said its tokenized equity platform, called Ondo Global Markets, has raised over $500 million in total value locked and recorded over $7 billion in volume since launching in September 2025. It is now the largest by size among providers, ahead of issuers Kraken xStocks and Robinhood, RWA.xyz data shows. The total market for equity tokens is just shy of $1 billion, growing 27% over the past 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 efforts increasingly include alternative assets like real estate or private credit, Ondo is now laser-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 in May.
“You tokenize something either to make it easier to access it or to use it as collateral,” de Bode said. “Equities fit both, and they price like assets people actually understand—as opposed to a building in Manhattan.”
Ondo issues tokenized notes backed by shares held through clearing brokers. These tokens move freely across wallets as stablecoins, where users only need to KYC at the minting stage. This structure allows the assets to trade on decentralized finance (DeFi) venues, where other tokenized equity models often struggle due to transfer restrictions or illiquid pools.
A major advantage, de Bode argued, is instant minting and burning, which allows large investors to trade millions of dollars in tokenized shares at prices that mirror their brokerage account, without premiums or slippage. One investor, he said, minted $17 million worth of Google stock tokens.
This mechanism has attracted users in Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America, as well as crypto-native investors looking to switch between cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and Google shares without ever leaving their wallet.
But liquidity is still thinning out over the weekend, de Bode said. Crypto markets and decentralized finance (DeFi) run around the clock – 24/7 – while traditional finance (TradFi) runs Monday to Friday. That mismatch makes it difficult for market makers to hedge equity tokens.
That could change if the NYSE and Nasdaq follow through on their plans to support 24/7 tokenized stock trading that effectively synchronizes TradFi and DeFi clocks, de Bode said.
“If TradFi moves to 24/7, it’s a godsend,” he said. “That’s our biggest bottleneck.”
Ondo’s focus for this year is to expand its global market platform – adding hundreds more assets, integrating with new blockchains and operating crypto exchanges that want to compete with retail brokers.
“Our goal is not to compete with exchanges,” de Bode said. “We run them. Think of us as Tether for stocks.”
