Ondo Perps turns tokenized stocks into collateral for 20x equity futures

Why it matters

Ondo Perps pushes tokenized equities from passive exposure into margin infrastructure, testing whether onchain stocks can become collateral for active trading rather than another wrapper around U.S. assets.

Ondo Finance launched Ondo Perps on July 7th, opening a non-custodial market where eligible users outside the United States can trade perpetual futures tied to stocks, ETFs, indices and commodities with up to 20x leverage while posting tokenized stocks and ETFs as collateral, according to Ondo Finance's announcement.

The product is the first major launch from Ondo Finance since the sudden death of founder Nathan Allman in late May 2026. Allman, who co-founded Ondo Finance in 2021 with Pinku Surana after working on Goldman Sachs' Digital Assets team, built the company around a simple institutional-crypto premise: bring traditional financial assets onchain, then make them usable inside programmable markets. Ian De Bode, now president of Ondo Finance and the executive quoted in the launch release, is pushing that thesis from tokenized ownership into derivatives and margin.

Ondo says Ondo Perps lets traders post tokenized stock and ETF holdings directly against perpetual futures positions, rather than selling those holdings or keeping a separate stablecoin balance on another venue. The distinction matters. Tokenized equities have mostly been pitched as a distribution product: give non-U.S. investors easier access to U.S. market exposure. Ondo Perps turns those instruments into working collateral inside a trading account.

The launch is aimed squarely at non-U.S. investors. Ondo's disclaimer says Ondo Perps is made available by Ondo Global Panama Inc., doing business as Ondo Perps, using technology developed by Ondo Finance Inc. Access is prohibited for people in the United States, Panama, Canada and other restricted jurisdictions, and Ondo says neither Ondo Perps nor its perpetual futures contracts are registered with the SEC, the CFTC, Panama's securities regulator or any other regulator.

The bet: collateral reuse, not just synthetic stocks

Ondo Perps offers perpetual futures on U.S. equities, ETFs and commodities. Ondo's release lists examples including SPCX, Micron, Apple, Nvidia, Tesla, QQQ, gold and silver. The company says the platform combines 24/7 trading, up to 20x leverage and liquidity sourced from traditional financial markets.

The stronger claim is the collateral design. Ondo says users can post tokenized securities as margin for derivatives positions, with portfolio-level risk assessment so multiple tokenized equities can sit in one capital pool. In practice, that means a user holding tokenized Apple or QQQ exposure could keep that exposure while using it to back a hedge or a directional perp trade.

That is the part of the launch that fits Ondo Finance's history. The Block reported in August 2021 that Ondo Finance raised a $4 million seed round led by Pantera Capital, with Genesis, Digital Currency Group, CMS Holdings, CoinFund and Divergence Ventures participating. At the time, Ondo Finance was building structured DeFi vaults that split positions into fixed and variable risk tranches. Allman described users constructing customized return profiles by choosing the mix of positions they wanted.

Ondo Finance later raised a $20 million Series A co-led by Founders Fund and Pantera Capital, with Coinbase Ventures, Tiger Global and others participating, according to CoinDesk. That round was framed around structured products and the idea that DeFi could make investment products cheaper to administer for smaller investors.

Ondo Perps is a cleaner, more aggressive version of that same idea. The user is no longer choosing between vault tranches. The user is holding tokenized equities, then borrowing against them inside a perp venue.

A launch under new leadership

The timing gives the product a second layer. Ondo Finance announced on June 1st that Allman had died at 32, and De Bode signed that post as CEO. The post described Allman as Ondo Finance's founder and said the company would continue moving forward under its senior leadership.

De Bode joined Ondo Finance in 2024 as chief strategy officer after serving as a McKinsey partner focused on digital assets, according to Ondo Finance's hiring announcement. By July 2026, he is the executive attaching his name to a more complex and more regulated-adjacent extension of the company's product line.

"Hundreds of millions of investors outside the United States can now access 24/7 exposure to stocks, ETFs, and commodities with up to 20x leverage, and deploy tokenized stock holdings as productive capital," De Bode said in the July 7th launch release.

That sentence is doing the commercial work of the announcement. Ondo Finance is saying tokenized equities should compete with brokerage accounts on access, hours and capital use. The compliance perimeter tells the other half of the story: the product is built for global demand for U.S. market exposure, while the U.S. market remains outside the door.

Ondo is building on real tokenized-equity traction

Ondo Perps depends on Ondo Global Markets, the tokenized-equity platform Ondo launched in September 2025. Ondo said in the July 7th release that Ondo Global Markets has grown about 5% per week since launch and now has more than $1 billion in total value locked.

That $1 billion figure is not new to this launch. Ondo Finance said in a May 11th PR Newswire release that Ondo Global Markets had crossed $1 billion in TVL less than eight months after launch, offered more than 260 tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs, and had generated $18 billion in cumulative trading volume. Ondo also said then that its tokenized-equity issuer market share was above 70%, citing RWA.xyz.

Those are company-reported figures, but they explain why Ondo Finance is moving into perps now. A tokenized-stock venue with meaningful TVL has a natural second product: margin. Once users are holding tokenized equities, the next question is whether those holdings can be borrowed against, hedged, or used to trade related exposure without forcing the user to move capital elsewhere.

The opportunity also comes with a sharper risk profile. Perpetual futures have no expiry date and are built for continuous leveraged exposure. Ondo's own disclaimer says holders can lose their full purchase price. The platform's pitch is capital efficiency; the tradeoff is that collateral reuse can carry liquidation risk across positions if markets move against the account.

Coinbase and Hyperliquid set the competitive clock

Ondo Perps is entering a market that crypto exchanges and onchain venues have already been testing. In March 2026, CoinDesk reported that Coinbase introduced stock perpetual futures for eligible non-U.S. traders, with contracts tied to large-cap U.S. stocks and ETFs. Coinbase's own help documentation says single-name stock perps launch with up to 10x maximum leverage, while equity index baskets launch with up to 20x.

Ondo's differentiation is the collateral base. Coinbase's stock perps are cash-settled in USDC and cross-margined with approved collateral on Coinbase International Exchange. Ondo Perps is pitching a tighter loop between tokenized stocks and derivatives: the same tokenized equity products Ondo Global Markets distributes can become margin for Ondo Perps positions.

That makes Ondo Perps less of a standalone trading app than a layer on top of Ondo Finance's tokenized-asset business. If tokenized stocks are only wrappers around equities, the market becomes a distribution fight among issuers, brokers, wallets and exchanges. If tokenized stocks become collateral, Ondo Finance can argue that it is building financial infrastructure around those assets rather than listing another synthetic equity product.

The hard part is proving the product can attract liquidity and retain users without U.S. access. Ondo claims Ondo Perps has execution speed comparable to top centralized crypto exchanges and liquidity comparable to traditional derivatives venues. Those claims remain Ondo's until outside volume, spreads and open-interest data show how the market performs under real trading conditions.

For now, Ondo Perps gives De Bode a clear first act after Allman's death: take the founder's onchain markets thesis into the part of finance where collateral, speed and risk engines decide whether a product matters. The launch does not resolve the regulatory boundary around tokenized securities and equity-linked perps. It shows Ondo Finance intends to build right up to that boundary for everyone outside the United States.