Ondo Finance’s tokenized stocks and ETFs platform reached $1 billion in total value locked within eight months of launching, a pace that John Hoffman, the company’s managing director and head of product portfolios, compared with the early growth of exchange-traded funds.
Speaking at the Wyoming Blockchain Symposium 2026, Hoffman said tokenized assets are following a development path that resembles the ETF market’s formative years: early questions focus on whether the structure works, who it serves and which financial frictions it can remove. Hoffman joined Ondo a little more than two months ago after 18 years in traditional finance, most recently leading Invesco’s ETF business in the Americas.
The comparison frames tokenization less as a replacement for established financial products than as a new method of distributing them. ETFs made diversified market exposure easier to trade through brokerage accounts. Tokenized versions of Treasuries, stocks and funds seek to put similar exposures on blockchain networks, where transfers, settlement and collateral management can operate around the clock.
Ondo points to faster growth across tokenized assets
Hoffman said Ondo’s Global Markets platform, which offers tokenized stocks and ETFs outside the United States, accumulated $1 billion in TVL in eight months. TVL is a commonly used measure of assets deposited into or represented by a blockchain-based protocol, though it is not the same as trading volume or revenue.
He contrasted that trajectory with prior crypto-linked asset categories. Stablecoins took roughly three years to reach $1 billion in scale, Hoffman said, while tokenized U.S. Treasuries reached that level in about 18 months. Ondo Stocks, as he referred to the platform, did so in eight months.
Those comparisons reflect a market in which products linked to familiar assets may be gaining acceptance faster than earlier blockchain financial tools. Tokenized Treasuries offer holders exposure to short-duration U.S. government debt, while tokenized equities aim to make shares or ETF-linked instruments available through onchain infrastructure. Their appeal depends less on introducing a new asset class than on changing the way existing assets can be accessed, transferred and used in decentralized finance.
The pace also comes with an important limitation: Ondo’s tokenized stocks and ETF products are not currently offered in the United States. That leaves the company’s reported expansion tied primarily to international demand and to the jurisdictions where the products can legally be made available.
Treasury products established Ondo’s base
Ondo began offering tokenized U.S. Treasury exposure in early 2023 with OUSG, an institutional fund connected to short-term U.S. government debt. Hoffman said Ondo now has approximately $2 billion in TVL across its Treasury products.
Tokenized Treasury products emerged as one of the clearest use cases for blockchain-based finance during periods of elevated interest rates. They give eligible users a blockchain-native representation of an asset tied to conventional government securities, potentially allowing that exposure to be transferred or integrated with other onchain applications more easily than holdings in a conventional money-market account.
The structure does not remove the underlying financial and operational risks. Users still need to consider the credit and custody arrangements behind a product, the legal rights attached to a token, redemption conditions, smart-contract risks and the restrictions imposed by local securities rules. Yet the growth of Treasury-linked tokens has put pressure on tokenization providers to show that blockchain settlement delivers practical benefits beyond the novelty of a digital wrapper.
For Ondo, Treasury products appear to have supplied the initial product-market fit before the company moved into a broader range of tokenized securities. The firm’s next steps point toward products designed around portfolio construction rather than a single asset.
Portfolio tokens and perpetuals expand the product range
Hoffman said Ondo is preparing “intelligent portfolios,” which would package tokenized equities into a single token. Such a product could offer users exposure to a selected group of stocks through one onchain instrument, echoing the basket-based approach familiar from ETFs.
The proposal also shows where the ETF analogy has limits. An ETF operates within a mature framework involving exchanges, authorized participants, fund managers, custodians and securities regulators. A tokenized portfolio would need to address equivalent questions around the assets backing the token, pricing, rebalancing, transfer restrictions and investor protections, while functioning across blockchain networks.
Separately, Hoffman said Ondo’s perpetuals platform had processed approximately $9 billion in notional trading volume since its launch seven weeks earlier. Notional volume measures the face value of positions traded and does not represent the amount of assets held on the platform. Perpetual futures are derivatives contracts without an expiry date, and their activity should be viewed separately from the funds held in tokenized Treasury or equity products.
The combination of yield-bearing Treasury products, tokenized equities, portfolio products and derivatives gives Ondo a wider product lineup than a single-asset tokenization issuer. It also places more weight on the company’s ability to manage different regulatory classifications and market structures.
U.S. legislation remains a central constraint
Hoffman said legislation including the proposed Clarity Act could enable Ondo to offer tokenized products in the United States. The company’s current geographic restrictions make regulatory treatment one of the clearest dividing lines between its global ambitions and its present distribution model.
A U.S. framework that defines how digital-asset platforms can issue, trade and custody tokenized securities would potentially give providers a clearer route to serve American customers. It would not automatically make every product available: tokenized stocks, funds and derivatives could each face separate requirements under securities, commodities and broker-dealer rules.
For now, Ondo’s reported milestones offer a measure of demand for blockchain-delivered versions of conventional financial assets outside the U.S. The faster growth rate cited by Hoffman suggests that tokenization is moving beyond its earliest proof-of-concept phase, while the unresolved U.S. rulebook remains a practical limit on how broadly these products can be distributed.
Explore how tokenized equities work and their ETF-like growth potential in regulated markets.
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