万亿赛道的扛旗手，倒在了胜利前

Original author: ChandlerZ, Foresight News

Ondo Finance announced on its official Twitter on May 26, 2026, that its founder and CEO Nathan Allman had passed away unexpectedly, and appointed long-time President Ian De Bode as the new CEO. The company stated in the announcement that Allman's family and loved ones will receive full support from the company, without disclosing further details regarding the cause of death.

The announcement also emphasized that Allman had built an executive team capable of independent operations. Ian De Bode has been effectively responsible for the company's strategy, products, and daily operations over the past two years and has received full support from the management. The company clearly stated that it will continue the direction that Allman initiated.

From Goldman Sachs to the Regulatory Table for Tokenized Securities

Nathan Allman was widely recognized as one of the core drivers in the RWA sector. He earned his undergraduate degree from Brown University, majoring in Economics and Biology. He subsequently pursued an MBA at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business.

In 2018, he operated his own crypto hedge fund, ChainStreet Capital. In 2019, he joined the Digital Assets business line within Goldman Sachs' Global Markets division, focusing on building cryptocurrency market services for institutional investors and utilizing blockchain infrastructure to transform the issuance and trading processes of traditional securities. This experience provided the direct methodological foundation for his later product design. Two years later, he left Goldman Sachs to found Ondo Finance.

In 2021, Allman founded Ondo Finance, clearly positioning the project as a "compliant gateway connecting traditional finance with on-chain infrastructure." Ondo's core product lines unfolded along this path.

In its early days, Ondo focused on DeFi structured yield products. In 2023, its direction shifted towards tokenizing real-world assets. The first product of this transition was OUSG (Ondo Short-Term US Treasuries Fund). Users deposit stablecoins like USDC, Ondo uses these funds to purchase short-term U.S. Treasury bills, and distributes the yield to holders in the form of tokens. Meanwhile, USDY packages the yield from short-term Treasury bills into a perpetual token, open to non-U.S. qualified investors.

At the time, the largest tokenized Treasury product on the market was BlackRock's BUIDL fund, which had a minimum investment of $5 million, putting it out of reach for average investors. In early 2024, Allman made a critical decision: integrate BUIDL into OUSG's underlying assets. This allowed Ondo users to indirectly hold BlackRock-managed Treasuries through OUSG, while lowering the minimum investment threshold from $5 million to $100,000 and enabling 24/7 subscription and redemption. This move solidified Ondo's position in the RWA sector. Throughout 2024, Ondo's TVL grew from $40 million to $534 million, a 13-fold increase.

Following Treasuries came equities. In September 2025, Allman launched Ondo Global Markets, expanding tokenized assets from U.S. Treasuries to U.S. stocks and ETFs. The logic behind this product was that a vast number of investors globally cannot directly buy U.S. stocks due to geographic restrictions, account setup barriers, or time zone differences. Ondo tokenized over 260 U.S. securities, including Apple, Nvidia, and S&P 500 ETFs, allowing non-U.S. users to trade these tokenized versions 24/7 on Solana, Ethereum, and BNB Chain. In an interview with CNBC, Allman stated that much of the demand came from crypto users who had never tried traditional asset investments, with ETFs serving as their most accessible entry point.

Within 48 hours of launch, Ondo Global Markets surpassed $240 million in TVL, and after 8 months, it exceeded $1 billion, becoming the first tokenized stock platform to reach this scale. Combined with OUSG and USDY, the platform's total TVL once exceeded $4 billion, capturing approximately 58% of the tokenized stock market.

However, the biggest obstacle for tokenized securities has never been technology, but regulation. In the U.S., the issuance and trading of securities are strictly regulated by the SEC, making the on-chain tokenization of stocks legally a gray area. Allman's chosen path was direct engagement.

In April 2025, he led a team to meet with the SEC's Crypto Task Force to discuss a compliance framework for tokenized U.S. securities. In December of the same year, Ondo submitted a tokenized securities roadmap to the SEC, with the core demand being formal SEC recognition of the legal status of public blockchains in the tokenized securities market, opening the door for retail investors. That same month, the SEC quietly closed its confidential investigation into Ondo's tokenized U.S. Treasuries and the ONDO token without filing any charges. For a crypto company operating in a regulatory gray area, this was essentially a tacit endorsement.

In terms of funding, Ondo has raised a total of $46 million. Founders Fund and Pantera Capital co-led the Series A round, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Tiger Global, and Wintermute. In July 2025, Allman and Pantera jointly established the $250 million Ondo Catalyst Fund, specifically targeting investments in RWA infrastructure projects.

The Final Pieces Allman Left Behind

In December 2025, Ondo Finance announced it had submitted its tokenized securities roadmap to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). It stated that direct registration, beneficial ownership, and wrapped and associated security ownership models all coexist in today's financial markets and play important roles on-chain. In the letter, Ondo urged the SEC to permit these three models by: 1. Supporting direct and intermediary ownership models; 2. Accepting permissioned, permissionless, and hybrid blockchains; 3. Providing targeted regulatory clarity for transfer agent-based tokenization; 4. Allowing broader tokenization of securities held at DTC.

In the weeks leading up to Allman's death, Ondo accomplished several things never before done in the industry.

On May 6, Ondo Finance's official blog disclosed that it had completed the first near real-time cross-border, cross-bank exchange of tokenized U.S. Treasury fund shares in collaboration with Kinexys by J.P. Morgan, Mastercard, and Ripple. The traditional cross-border securities redemption process typically takes several days: an investor submits a redemption request, the custodian bank confirms the holdings, a fund transfer is initiated via interbank networks like SWIFT, and multiple intermediaries confirm one by one.

In this pilot project, Ripple exchanged its holdings of Ondo Short-Term US Government Bonds (OUSG) on the XRP Ledger. Ondo processed the exchange and sent a fiat payment instruction via Mastercard's Multi-Token Network. The funds were settled by Kinexys by J.P. Morgan's blockchain infrastructure and delivered via its correspondent banking network to Ripple's bank account in Singapore.

Around the same time, Ondo received a No-Action Letter from the SEC, clearing the compliance hurdle for issuing tokenized securities on Ethereum. The company stated that the scope of this application was limited; the OGM product's positioning remained unchanged, serving as tokenized notes providing non-U.S. investors with exposure to U.S. stocks and ETFs. The underlying securities and official book records remain within the existing custody framework, held by custodian BitGo. The key change was that, in limited circumstances, related securities rights would be simultaneously recorded in tokenized form on the Ethereum mainnet to optimize collateral monitoring, subscription/redemption processes, and reconciliation operations.

On May 5, the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) announced that its DTC tokenization service had been collaborating with over 50 financial institutions and had inducted Ondo into the Tokenized Securities Alliance, alongside BlackRock and Goldman Sachs. This service will support the tokenization of RWA held at DTC, providing identical rights and investor protections to traditional forms. DTCC plans to launch initial limited production transactions in July 2026, with a full service launch in October.

A crypto-native team founded just five years ago counts J.P. Morgan, BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, DTCC, and Mastercard among its partners. Numerous projects in the RWA sector are working on tokenization, but almost only Ondo sits simultaneously at the SEC's negotiation table and within DTCC's alliance. The establishment of these partnerships is inseparable from Allman's personal drive.

A Successor Already in Place for Two Years

Ondo stated in its announcement that Allman had helped them build a durable organization. The specific meaning of this statement points to his successor, Ian De Bode.

Before joining Ondo, De Bode was the Global Head of Digital Assets at McKinsey, having spent over a decade in consulting guiding institutional digital transformations. He also holds an MBA from Stanford. He joined Ondo as Chief Strategy Officer in late 2023, was promoted to President in November 2025, and has been leading the company's strategy, products, and daily operations for over two years. Ondo's announcement specifically emphasized that De Bode has the "full confidence" of the management team.

For a crypto company, this level of organizational preparedness—having a successor who has been in place for over two years and is fully familiar with all operations immediately take over after the founder's unexpected death—is exceedingly rare. Projects in the crypto industry often rely heavily on the founder's personal influence and community appeal, and a founder's departure typically signals directional risk and a crisis of trust. However, the test Allman left for De Bode is clear. Allman personally led the negotiations with the SEC last April, and the personal relationship network he built regarding cooperation with regulators and Wall Street institutions is something De Bode needs to prove he can inherit.

The ONDO token fell about 6% following the news announcement, currently trading at $0.413. Market reaction was relatively restrained, with no signs of panic selling.

Allman had no publicly documented health issues before his death. Ondo's announcement used the term "unexpected passing" without disclosing the specific cause. The DTCC tokenized securities pilot in July was a new milestone he had planned, but he will not live to see it launch.