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.
From Ondo Chain to Ondo Network
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.
Wider context
The move comes as tokenization, the process of representing traditional assets such as stocks, bonds and funds as blockchain-based tokens, gains traction across Wall Street. Firms are pursuing faster settlement and around-the-clock trading, and perpetual futures, once confined to crypto markets, are expanding into equities and commodities such as oil and gold.
The catch sits in the design itself. A company built on the argument that public blockchains modernise finance has decided those chains are not good enough for the part that matters most, and has moved order matching into a system only it can see. Institutional clients get the confidentiality they asked for. What they give up is the public verifiability that made onchain markets distinctive, because there is no independent way to check execution quality or the order in which trades were filled.
There is a track record question too. Ondo Chain was announced in February 2025 and abandoned roughly eighteen months later without shipping as originally described, which is worth holding in mind when reading the list of things Ondo Network will eventually support.
For token holders the picture is unresolved. ONDO traded around $0.41 on Thursday, roughly 80% below its all-time high of $2.14, and the company has not said whether or how the token will feature in the new network.
