Tokenized asset specialist Ondo Finance has scrapped its plans for a conventional layer-1 blockchain and replaced them with a private trading network designed for institutional-grade speed and confidentiality. The decision, announced on Tuesday, means one of the sector’s largest issuers has concluded that a public blockchain is not the right place to actually match a trade.
The company’s February 2025 vision called for a product named Ondo Chain, a blockchain aimed at institutional finance and tokenized real-world assets. After building out its new perpetual futures platform, Ondo Perps, the firm said it concluded that a traditional blockchain was not the best tool for the speed and privacy institutional trading requires.
The replacement, called Ondo Network, separates trade execution from final settlement. Orders are matched and executed privately for greater speed, while finalized asset transfers settle on existing public blockchains. The design addresses a concern common among institutional investors, who want the benefits of blockchain settlement without exposing their positions, order flow and strategy to competitors.
CEO Ian de Bode said the network is a continuation of what the company set out to build with Ondo Chain, describing it as ‘where we landed when we looked at the actual needs’ of the applications it was developing.
Ondo Perps is the first live application
Ondo Perps is already running as the first application on the network. Ondo said it plans to let users post tokenized assets as collateral for perpetual futures trades, and that the infrastructure could eventually support spot markets, lending, structured products and broader settlement services alongside perps.
No timeline was given for any of those additions, and the company did not disclose volumes, user numbers or any other measure of how much activity Ondo Perps is currently handling.
Regulatory momentum and scale
The strategic pivot arrives as Ondo has grown into one of the tokenization sector’s largest issuers. According to rwa.xyz, the company holds roughly $2.6 billion in tokenized US Treasury products spanning its OUSG and USDY vehicles, alongside approximately $850 million in tokenized equities.
Last week, Ondo’s broker-dealer arm received FINRA approval to launch regulated markets and services for tokenized securities, adding a compliance layer that strengthens its institutional pitch.