Woofun AI reports that Ondo Finance has officially launched Ondo Perps, a perpetual decentralized exchange that merges real-world asset (RWA) tokenization with derivatives trading, marking a strategic expansion by the RWA leader into the perp DEX sector under the oversight of Eric from Foresight News.

The perpetual contract landscape is undergoing a structural transformation, evolving from niche experiments into a dominant force within the derivatives market. By 2025, the total trading volume of Perp DEXs reached $7.9 trillion, capturing nearly 10% of the total trading volume previously held by centralized exchanges. Despite this growth, a critical limitation persisted: most platforms were confined to crypto-native assets, with trading pairs restricted to Bitcoin, Ethereum, and select altcoins, while collateral was almost exclusively limited to stablecoins. In contrast, the RWA tokenization sector has expanded rapidly, growing from concept validation in 2023 to a market valued at over $30 billion. Within this space, Ondo Finance has secured an undisputed leadership position, with its tokenized stock platform, Ondo Global Markets, commanding nearly 70% of the market share—approximately 2.5 times that of its nearest competitor. This divergence highlights a significant gap in the market: while Perp DEXs have scaled in volume, they have lacked access to traditional financial assets, a void Ondo Perps aims to fill by integrating institutional-grade asset issuance with crypto-native trading infrastructure.

Ondo’s trajectory began in 2021 when former Goldman Sachs employee Nathan Allman and Pinku Surana founded the company as a DeFi structured products protocol.

However, between late 2022 and early 2023, the team recognized the limitations of closed-loop DeFi models and pivoted toward bridging traditional finance with on-chain ecosystems. This strategic shift led to the launch of OUSG, a tokenized Treasury bond fund, followed by USDY, a product designed for non-U.S. retail investors. These offerings addressed a critical market need: crypto capital seeking low-risk, high-yield on-chain destinations during the Federal Reserve’s aggressive rate-hike cycle, which made Treasury bonds highly attractive. This pivot established Ondo as a key player in the RWA space, laying the groundwork for its subsequent expansion into equity and derivatives markets.

The company’s leadership and operational strategy have evolved significantly since its inception. At the end of May, Nathan Allman, the founder and CEO who drove much of the RWA tokenization effort, passed away unexpectedly. Ian De Bode, the long-time president, assumed the role of CEO, bringing over two years of experience in managing the company’s strategy, products, and daily operations. Under this leadership, Ondo demonstrated strong execution capabilities, notably in March 2024 when BlackRock launched the tokenized money market fund BUIDL. Ondo quickly transferred the majority of its OUSG holdings to BUIDL, leveraging the credit backing of the world’s largest asset management firm while maintaining independence in distribution channels. By 2025, Ondo’s total value locked (TVL) exceeded $2.5 billion, with USDY alone accounting for over $1 billion, solidifying its position as the largest tokenized Treasury bond product for retail investors globally.

Ondo Global Markets, launched in September 2025, further expanded the company’s scope from fixed income to equity assets. The platform offers trading in over 260 tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs, covering high-growth sectors such as AI, biotechnology, defense, and energy. With TVL surpassing $1 billion in less than eight months and cumulative trading volume exceeding $18 billion, Ondo Global Markets has achieved growth rates unprecedented in financial product history. Regulatory compliance has also been a priority; Ondo obtained approval in Liechtenstein, covering 30 European countries, and submitted registration filings to the SEC. Collaborations with traditional financial giants like JPMorgan and Mastercard enabled the first cross-border tokenized Treasury bond redemption test, while partnerships with firms like Franklin Templeton underscored Ondo’s pivotal role in the RWA ecosystem.

Woofun AI data shows that the competitive landscape for Perp DEXs is intensifying, with platforms like Hyperliquid and pump.fun vying for market share. During the weekend of the U.S.-Iran war, Hyperliquid handled significant trading volumes for gold, silver, and crude oil, drawing coverage from Bloomberg.

Meanwhile, pump.fun entered the scene before launching its DEX, PumpSwap, which captured a substantial share of the meme token trading market. Thirteen months after PumpSwap’s launch, it ranked second in trading volume, closely trailing the leader, while Raydium, once the dominant player, held only 5% market share. This dynamic illustrates the rapid consolidation and competition in the DEX space, highlighting the opportunity for new entrants like Ondo Perps to differentiate themselves through unique asset offerings and institutional-grade infrastructure.

Ondo Perps is designed as a perpetual futures platform focused on tokenized stocks, indices, and commodities, combining institutional-grade financial infrastructure with a permissionless global trading platform. Currently, the platform supports up to 20x leverage for commodities and stock indices, and up to 10x leverage for most U.S. stock contracts. It offers 24/7 trading across 24 perpetual contract markets, including 16 U.S. stocks (SPCX, MU, NVDA, TSLA, AAPL, MSFT, GOOGL, AMZN, META, NFLX, AMD, INTC, ORCL, PLTR, COIN, HOOD, MSTR, CRCL), three commodities (XAU, XAG, WTI), two indices (US 500, US 100), and one ETF (Roundhill Memory ETF, DRAM). This diverse asset selection provides traders with unprecedented flexibility in global asset allocation, representing a qualitative leap in the Perp DEX space.

In terms of mechanics, Ondo Perps requires users to transfer USDC on Ethereum to an address provided by Ondo before trading, rather than trading directly from their wallets. The platform uses a full-position mode, where margin is shared across long and short positions for different assets. Looking ahead, Ondo Perps plans to adopt a multi-asset collateral system, allowing tokenized U.S. stocks and Treasuries to be used as collateral alongside stablecoins. This feature enables hedging operations without selling investment portfolios, restructuring the system’s risk calculation logic to resemble traditional portfolio margining. By treating the entire asset portfolio as a unified risk pool, the system can automatically recognize natural hedging relationships, such as holding a long position in tokenized SPY and a short position in an S&P 500 perpetual contract, thereby reducing required margin and serving complex quantitative strategies.

Liquidity on Ondo Perps is sourced not from on-chain pools but from traditional exchanges like Nasdaq and NYSE through the issuance and redemption mechanisms of tokenized stocks. This approach ensures that price discovery and liquidity depth are derived from trillion-dollar traditional markets, rather than limited on-chain liquidity. The platform claims to be the fastest permissionless perpetual contract trading platform, with order routing, margin updates, and liquidation processed in real time while maintaining decentralized security. To balance decentralization and user experience, Ondo aggregates funds, processes order routing, trading, and liquidation off-chain, and distributes funds on-chain, ensuring efficient execution and risk management.

Ondo’s ecosystem strategy extends beyond trading, aiming to create a unified network that spans spot and derivatives markets. Tokenized stocks issued on Ondo Global Markets can be transferred cross-chain to ecosystems like Hyperliquid’s HyperEVM via Ondo Bridge and traded directly on Ondo Perps. This integration creates a network effect that is difficult for competitors to replicate, as it combines multi-chain RWA infrastructure with advanced trading capabilities. Partnerships with Chainlink provide institutional-grade price oracles for tokenized stocks, enabling their use as collateral in DeFi lending markets. Integrations with lending protocols like Euler allow traders to borrow funds without selling holdings, transforming tokenized assets from passive yield generators into active credit foundations. This 'holdings-as-capital' model brings traditional financial market maker services to the blockchain, enhancing the utility of ERC-20 tokens.

The launch of Ondo Perps represents the convergence of two major trends: the progression of RWA tokenization from marginal experiments to mainstream financial infrastructure, and the evolution of Perp DEXs from crypto-only derivatives tools to platforms covering all asset classes. Ondo’s position as the largest RWA issuer, with deep institutional partnerships and broad regulatory coverage, places it at the intersection of these trends. For traders, Ondo Perps offers a new possibility: using NVDA stocks as collateral, trading S&P 500 perpetual contracts on Sunday nights, and accessing institutional-level liquidity and execution speed. This experience, unavailable in traditional finance or existing DeFi, signals the emergence of a next-generation financial infrastructure where the boundaries between traditional finance and crypto-native systems are fading, and assets become pure financial building blocks that can be combined anytime, anywhere.