万亿赛道扛旗手，倒在胜利前夕

Original author: ChandlerZ, Foresight News

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

The announcement also emphasized that Allman had built an executive team capable of independent operation. 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 explicitly stated it would continue the direction Allman had set.

From Goldman Sachs to the Regulatory Table for Tokenized Securities

Nathan Allman was widely recognized as a core driver in the RWA sector. He earned his undergraduate degree from Brown University, majoring in Economics and Biology, before pursuing an MBA at Stanford 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 leveraging blockchain infrastructure to transform the issuance and trading processes of traditional securities. This experience provided a 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 were developed along this path.

In its early days, Ondo focused on DeFi structured yield products. In 2023, the direction shifted towards tokenized real-world assets. The first product of this transformation was OUSG (Ondo Short-Term US Treasuries Fund). Users deposit stablecoins like USDC, Ondo uses these funds to purchase short-term US Treasuries, and then distributes the yield to holders in the form of tokens. Simultaneously, USDY packages the yield from short-term Treasuries into a perpetual token, offering access to non-US accredited investors.

At that 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 ordinary investors. In early 2024, Allman made a crucial decision: integrate BUIDL into the underlying assets of OUSG. This allowed Ondo users to indirectly hold BlackRock-managed Treasuries through OUSG, while lowering the entry barrier from $5 million to $100,000 and enabling 24/7 subscriptions and redemptions. 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.

After Treasuries came stocks. In September 2025, Allman launched Ondo Global Markets, expanding the tokenization target from US Treasuries to US stocks and ETFs. The logic behind this product was that a vast number of global investors cannot directly buy US stocks due to geographical restrictions, account opening hurdles, or time zone differences. Ondo tokenized over 260 US securities, including Apple, Nvidia, and S&P 500 ETFs, onto the blockchain. Non-US users could trade these tokenized versions 24/7 on Solana, Ethereum, and BNB Chain. Allman stated in a CNBC interview that much of the demand came from crypto users who hadn't yet tried investing in traditional assets, and ETFs served as the easiest entry point for them.

Ondo Global Markets exceeded $240 million in TVL within 48 hours of its launch, and surpassed $1 billion in 8 months, becoming the first tokenized stock platform to reach that 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 US, the issuance and trading of securities are strictly regulated by the SEC, and turning stocks into on-chain tokens operates in a legal gray area. Allman's chosen path was direct engagement.

In April 2025, he led a meeting with the SEC's Crypto Task Force to discuss a compliance framework for tokenized US securities. In December of the same year, Ondo submitted a tokenized securities roadmap to the SEC, with the core request being formal 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 a confidential investigation into Ondo's tokenized US Treasuries and ONDO token without filing any charges. For a crypto company operating in a regulatory gray area, this was essentially a tacit approval.

In terms of fundraising, 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 a $250 million Ondo Catalyst Fund dedicated to investing 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 US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), stating that direct registration, beneficial ownership, and wrapped and associated securities ownership models all coexist in today's financial markets and have important on-chain roles. In the letter, Ondo urged the SEC to allow these three models by: supporting both direct and intermediary ownership models; accepting permissioned, permissionless, and hybrid blockchains; providing targeted regulatory clarity for transfer agent-based tokenization; and permitting broader tokenization of securities held at the DTC.

In the weeks leading up to Allman's death, Ondo completed several things that no one in the industry had ever done before.

On May 6, the Ondo Finance official blog disclosed that, in collaboration with Kinexys by J.P. Morgan, Mastercard, and Ripple, it had completed the first near real-time cross-border, cross-bank exchange of a tokenized US Treasury fund. Traditional cross-border securities redemption processes typically take days: investors submit a redemption request, the custodian bank confirms the holdings, a fund transfer is initiated via interbank networks like SWIFT, and multiple intermediaries confirm sequentially.

In this pilot project, Ripple exchanged its holdings of Ondo Short-Term US Government Bonds (OUSG) held on the XRP Ledger. After processing the exchange, Ondo sent a fiat payment instruction via Mastercard Multi-Token Network, with Kinexys by J.P. Morgan's blockchain infrastructure executing the fund settlement and delivering the USD funds to Ripple's bank account in Singapore via its correspondent banking network.

Ondo also obtained a No-Action Letter from the SEC during the same period, clearing the compliance hurdle for issuing tokenized securities on Ethereum. The company stated that the scope of this application was limited and the positioning of the OGM product remained unchanged. It continues to offer non-US investors exposure to US stocks and ETFs via tokenized notes. The underlying securities and official book records remain within the existing custody structure, held by custodian BitGo. The core change is that, in limited circumstances, relevant securities rights are 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 collaborated with over 50 financial institutions, including Ondo in the Tokenized Securities Consortium, alongside BlackRock and Goldman Sachs. The service will support the tokenization of RWA held at DTC, providing rights and investor protections identical to traditional forms. DTCC plans to launch the first limited production transactions in July 2026, with a full service rollout in October.

A five-year-old crypto-native team with a list of partners including J.P. Morgan, BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, DTCC, and Mastercard. While many projects in the RWA sector are working on tokenization, almost only Ondo sits simultaneously at the SEC's negotiating table and within the DTCC's consortium. The establishment of these partnerships was intrinsically linked to Allman's personal efforts.

A Successor Already in Place for Two Years

In its announcement, Ondo stated that Allman had helped build a durable organization. This statement specifically points to the successor, Ian De Bode.

Prior to joining Ondo, De Bode was the Global Head of Digital Assets at McKinsey, having spent over a decade in consulting leading digital transformations for institutions. 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 the past two years. Ondo's announcement particularly emphasized that De Bode has the "full trust" of the management team.

For a crypto company, having a successor who has been in place for over two years and is familiar with all business operations ready to take over immediately after the founder's unexpected death is an exceptionally rare level of organizational preparedness. Projects in the crypto industry often heavily rely on the founder's personal influence and community appeal; a founder's departure usually implies directional risk and a crisis of trust. However, the challenge Allman left behind is clear. He personally led negotiations with the SEC in April last year. The personal relationship network he built at the regulatory level and with Wall Street institutions is something De Bode needs to prove he can sustain.

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

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