Ondo Finance brings tokenized stocks closer to their traditional counterparts, providing investors with a way to participate in corporate governance.
The feature, built with Broadridge Financial Solutions (BR), allows holders of more than 250 tokenized securities on Ondo’s platform to review company filings and submit their voting preferences through Broadridge’s ProxyVote system.
Investors can log in with crypto wallets and then access governance documents and tools typically reserved for brokerage accounts.
The move comes as tokenized stocks have become one of the fastest growing sectors in crypto, bringing stocks and ETFs onto the blockchain rails. The category now holds more than $1.1 billion in value locked, tripling its size over the past year, according to data from RWA.xyz. Ondo is the largest issuer in the industry, reporting over $700 million worth of stocks and ETF tokens on its Global Markets platform, available to non-US investors.
Adding proxy voting to equity tokens is important because these offerings often lack fundamental governance rights. Although Ondo’s tokens remain separate from the underlying shares and do not grant direct rights to shareholders, the new system allows investors to express their preferences which Ondo can apply when voting for the shares it holds.
“This really gets to the heart of Ondo’s vision of making traditional financial assets more accessible,” said Matthieu de Vergnes, Ondo’s global head of institutional banking, in an interview with CoinDesk. “You get all the benefits of being on-chain – freely transferable, DeFi-enabled – and on top of that, you get the governance you have of the underlying.”
Broadridge, which processes large volumes of proxy votes in traditional markets, is thus extending its infrastructure to blockchain systems. The company said the goal is to support digital and conventional assets within the same workflows.
Giving investors the same level of auditability, transparency and compliance “will go a long way to making the tokenized world more scalable, giving that level of confidence to end investors,” said Danielle Gurrieri, senior vice president and head of product management at Broadridge.
