Tokenized shares are rapidly gaining ground – and Ian de Bode, president at Ondo Finance ONDO$0.3006believes they are becoming one of the most practical and scalable use cases for crypto.
The company said its tokenized stock platform, called Ondo Global Markets, has raked in more than $500 million in total value and registered volume of more than $7 billion since launching in September 2025. It is now the largest among providers by size, ahead of issuers Kraken’s xStocks and Robinhood, data from RWA.xyz showed. The total equity token market is just under $1 billion and has grown 27% in the last month alone.
Previously, Ondo started with tokenized US Treasuries, and is now the largest issuer with over $2 billion in total assets.
While tokenization efforts increasingly include alternative assets such as real estate or private credit, Ondo is now focusing mainly on stocks and ETFs with strong price performance, deep liquidity and clear valuation, De Bode said in an interview with CoinDesk. The Herald will speak at CoinDesk’s Consensus Miami in May.
“You tokenize something to make it easier to access or to use it as collateral,” De Bode said. “Stocks fit both, and they price like 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 through wallets just like stablecoins, with users only requiring KYC during the minting phase. That structure allows the assets to be traded on decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms, where other tokenized equity models often struggle due to transfer restrictions or illiquid pools.
A major advantage, De Bode argued, is instant coin and burn, allowing large investors to trade millions of dollars in tokenized stocks at prices that reflect their investment account, without premiums or slippage. One investor, he said, has minted $17 million worth of Google stock tokens.
That mechanism has attracted users in Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America, as well as crypto-native investors looking to swap between cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin. BTC$82,746.78 and Google shares without ever leaving their wallets.
But liquidity still decreases on weekends, De Bode said. Crypto markets and decentralized finance (DeFi) operate around the clock – 24/7 – while traditional finance (TradFi) runs Monday through Friday. This mismatch makes hedging difficult for equity token market makers.
That could change if NYSE and Nasdaq follow through with their plans to support 24/7 tokenized stock trading, effectively synchronizing TradFi and DeFi clocks, De Bode said.
“If TradFi moves to 24/7, it will be a godsend,” he said. “It’s our biggest bottleneck.”
Ondo’s focus for this year is on expanding its global market platform – adding hundreds of additional assets, integrating with new blockchains and powering crypto exchanges that want to compete with retail brokers.
“Our goal is not to compete with trade fairs,” De Bode said. “We feed them. Think of us as the chain for stocks.”