The standard-bearer of a trillion-dollar赛道 fell just before victory.

Original author: ChandlerZ, Foresight News

On May 26, 2026, Ondo Finance announced on its official Twitter 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 loved ones would receive full support from the organization, without disclosing further details regarding the cause of death.

The announcement also emphasized that Allman had already built a senior management 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 secured full support from the management team. The company explicitly stated that it would continue along the path Allman had charted.

From Goldman Sachs to the Regulatory Table of 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 Graduate School of Business.

In 2018, he managed 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 bridge 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, the 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 US Treasury bonds, and distributes the yield to holders in the form of tokens. Concurrently, USDY packages the yield from short-term Treasuries into a perpetual token, open to non-US qualified 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 critical decision: integrate BUIDL into the underlying assets of OUSG. This allowed Ondo users to indirectly hold BlackRock-managed Treasuries through OUSG, lowering the entry barrier from $5 million to $100,000 and enabling 24/7 subscription and redemption. This move solidified Ondo's position in the RWA赛道. Throughout 2024, Ondo's TVL grew from $40 million to $534 million, a 13-fold increase.

After Treasuries came Equities. In September 2025, Allman launched Ondo Global Markets, expanding tokenized assets from US Treasuries to US stocks and ETFs. The logic behind this product was: a vast number of global investors cannot directly buy US stocks due to geographical restrictions, account opening barriers, or time zone differences. Ondo tokenized over 260 US securities—including Apple, Nvidia, and S&P 500 ETFs—onto the blockchain, allowing non-US users to trade these tokenized versions 24/7 on Solana, Ethereum, and BNB Chain. In an interview with CNBC, Allman noted that much of the demand came from crypto users who had never tried traditional asset investing, and ETFs were the easiest entry point for them.

Ondo Global Markets surpassed $240 million in TVL within 48 hours of launch, and exceeded $1 billion after 8 months, becoming the first tokenized equity 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 equity 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, placing tokenized stocks in a legal 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 US 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 public blockchains' legal status 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 US Treasuries and ONDO token without filing any charges. For a crypto company operating in a regulatory gray area, this amounted to tacit approval.

Regarding fundraising, Ondo has raised a total of $46 million. Founders Fund and Pantera Capital co-led the Series A, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Tiger Global, and Wintermute. In July 2025, Allman and Pantera jointly established the $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 U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), stating that direct registration, beneficial ownership, and wrapping and associated securities ownership models all coexist in today's financial markets and have 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 deposited with DTC.

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

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

In this pilot project, Ripple redeemed its holdings of Ondo Short-Term US Treasuries Fund (OUSG) held on the XRP Ledger. After processing the redemption, Ondo sent a fiat payment instruction via the Mastercard Multi-Token Network. The funds were settled by Kinexys by J.P. Morgan's blockchain infrastructure, which then delivered the USD funds to Ripple's bank account in Singapore through its correspondent banking network.

Ondo simultaneously received a No-Action Letter from the SEC, clearing the compliance hurdles for issuing tokenized securities on Ethereum. The company stated the scope of this application was limited, and the OGM product positioning remains unchanged: it continues to be a tokenized note offering non-US investors exposure to US stocks and ETFs, with the underlying securities and official book records maintained within the existing custody system, held by custodian BitGo. The key change is that, in limited circumstances, the 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 5th, the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) announced that its DTC Tokenization Service had initiated collaboration with over 50 financial institutions, adding Ondo to its Tokenized Securities Coalition alongside BlackRock and Goldman Sachs. This service will support the tokenization of RWA held in DTC custody, providing the same rights and investor protections as traditional forms. DTCC plans to launch initial limited production transactions in July 2026, with the service officially launching in October.

A crypto-native team established just five years ago, with a partner list including J.P. Morgan, BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, DTCC, and Mastercard. Numerous projects in the RWA赛道 are working on tokenization, but Ondo is arguably the only one sitting simultaneously at the SEC's negotiating table and within the DTCC's coalition. The establishment of these partnerships was inextricably linked to Allman's personal drive.

A Successor Who Has Been in Place for Two Years

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

Before joining Ondo, De Bode was the Global Head of Digital Assets at McKinsey, spending over a decade in the consulting industry advising on institutional digital transformation. 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, having a successor who has been in place for over two years, familiar with all business aspects, and can immediately take over after the founder's unexpected death is an exceedingly rare level of organizational preparedness. Projects in the crypto industry often heavily rely on the founder's personal influence and community appeal, and a founder's departure usually implies directional risk and a crisis of trust. However, the test Allman left behind is clear: he personally led the negotiations with the SEC last April, and the personal network of relationships he built at the regulatory level and with Wall Street institutions are things De Bode needs to prove he can handle.

The ONDO token dropped 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 at the time of his death. Ondo's announcement used the term "unexpected passing" and did not disclose 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 go live.