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 in crypto.
The company said its tokenized stocks 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 in terms of size among providers, ahead of issuers xStocks and Kraken’s Robinhood, according to data from RWA.xyz. The overall stock token market is worth just under $1 billion, growing 27% in the last month alone.
Before that, Ondo started with tokenized US Treasuries and is now the largest issuer with over $2 billion in total assets.
As tokenization attempts increasingly include alternative assets like real estate or private credit, Ondo is now focusing 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 either to make it easier to access or to use as collateral,” de Bode said. “Stocks fit both, and are priced for assets that people actually understand, unlike a building in Manhattan.”
Ondo issues tokenized notes backed by shares held through clearing brokers. These tokens move freely between wallets like stablecoins, with users only needing KYC at the minting stage. This structure allows assets to trade on decentralized finance (DeFi) sites, where other tokenized equity models often struggle due to transfer restrictions or illiquid pools.
A major advantage, de Bode says, is instant minting and burning, which allows large investors to trade millions of dollars of tokenized shares at prices reflective of their brokerage account, without premiums or slippage. One investor, he said, issued $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 who want to switch between cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. and Google shares without ever leaving its wallet.
But liquidity continues to decline on weekends, de Bode said. Crypto and decentralized finance (DeFi) markets operate 24/7, while traditional finance (TradFi) operates Monday through Friday. This mismatch makes hedging difficult for equity token market makers.
This could change if the NYSE and Nasdaq implement their plans to support 24/7 trading of tokenized stocks, effectively synchronizing the TradFi and DeFi clocks, de Bode said.
“If TradFi goes 24/7, that’s a godsend,” he said. “It’s our biggest bottleneck.”
Ondo’s goal for this year is to expand its global markets platform by adding hundreds of additional assets, integrating with new blockchains, and powering crypto exchanges looking to compete with retail brokers.
“Our goal is not to compete with the stock exchanges,” de Bode said. “We power them. Think of us as the Tether of stocks.”
