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06.02.2026
From The Markets

Ondo Finance: Remembering Nathan Allman and the Road Ahead

06.02.2026
Ondo Finance: Remembering Nathan Allman and the Road Ahead

Extracts from a letter from Ondo Finance’s CEO, @iandebode, remembering Ondo’s founder Nathan Allman and the road ahead:
“There is no good way to begin a post like this, and we’ve started it more than once. This past week, our founder, Nate Allman, passed away, suddenly, and far too young. He was 32.
In a moment like this, the instinct is to say everything at once, or nothing at all. There will be a time to express everything Nate meant to us; this isn’t quite that. What I want to do here is tell you the truth about where we are: how this week has gone, what Nate built, and how Ondo is going to keep moving forward. That is how we know to make Nate proud. Or as he would say: Onward.
I am stepping into the role of CEO with a clear sense of what it is: a responsibility to Nate, to his family, to this team, and to the mission we all share.
The Mission Has Not Changed
When Nate started Ondo, the idea was simple, and at the time, contrarian. The world’s financial markets are one of humanity’s great achievements, and they are also slow, expensive, fragmented, and closed to most of the people on the planet. Our mission has always been to change that: to make the financial system genuinely accessible to everyone.
Technology is how we get there. Blockchains, in particular, have been the most powerful tool we’ve ever had for the job, making it possible to hold assets without a custodian, transact without an intermediary, and build financial products without asking permission. Those properties are profound, and they remain foundational to everything we build.
And we’ve turned that idea into something real. Today Ondo is the undisputed leader in tokenized real-world assets. We’re approaching $4 billion in assets onchain, a milestone that would have sounded improbable not long ago and that reflects how quickly this category is maturing. Ondo tokenized Treasuries and yieldcoins opened up the US dollar and the risk-free rate to investors around the world. Ondo Global Markets, the leading tokenized stocks and ETFs platform, brought public equities onchain at scale with prices and liquidity comparable to brokerage accounts. And Ondo’s distribution network is unmatched across the world’s most popular exchanges, wallets, blockchains, and DeFi protocols to make those assets genuinely accessible.
We have built the most powerful tokenization engine that can put any publicly listed asset onchain, in size, with prices and liquidity comparable to brokerage accounts. We have built a distribution network that spans hundreds of millions of investors. And we have built a brand that stands for institutional-grade security, execution, and trust.
But that was never the destination. It was just the first step.
What Comes Next
With that foundation in place, Ondo is moving up the stack: toward the trading, prime brokerage, and asset management layers that turn tokenized assets into a complete financial system, open to anyone, including agents. To really take onchain financial services to the next level, investors need access to two things: leverage (for active traders) and customized portfolios (for more passive holders). Over time, these platforms combined will enable investors, or agents on their behalf, to invest in whatever and however they so desire: spot assets, or leverage, or portfolios that combine stocks, ETFs, crypto, commodities, and even prediction markets. This is the future of financial services, as Nate has laid it out, and one that we have been building towards from inception.
We are also building out the infrastructure that can power these platforms. In the next few days, we’ll share the next major step in our thinking about how to continue to improve the accessibility of markets, a meaningful evolution of the infrastructure we’ve been building, and the foundation for much of what comes next. We’ll have a great deal more to say about it soon.
That infrastructure is what will power the upcoming launch of Ondo Perps, the first perpetuals platform built for real-world assets, letting tokenized RWAs serve as collateral with deep, 24/7 liquidity. We’ve shared the plan for Perps already, and the platform will go live in the next few weeks.
The opportunity ahead of us is enormous: more than $160 trillion in liquid assets exist in the world today, and less than one-hundredth of one percent of them are onchain. We are still early, and there is an enormous amount left to build.
Onward
Nate often signed off his blog posts with a single word: Onward. It wasn’t a slogan. It was how he was built: always forward, never quite satisfied, certain the best was still ahead.We are grieving, and we will be for a long time. But we are not slowing down, because slowing down would honor neither what Nate built nor what his family has asked of us. Two feet on the gas pedal.Nate, thank you for the vision, the standard you held us to, and the company you trusted us to carry forward. We will make you proud.
Onward.
Ian De Bode, Chief Executive Officer, Ondo Finance

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