Ondo Finance Crosses $2.5B TVL as Tokenized Markets Hit Inflection Point

Remy: Ondo Finance has surpassed $2.5 billion in total value lock, cementing its position as the largest issuer of both tokenized U.S. treasuries and stocks. Now, Ondo controls over 50% of the total market share for tokenized equities, and with the recent expansion of Ondo Global Markets to the Solana network, Ondo now supports over 200 tokenized stocks and funds within decentralized protocols, and that accounts for approximately 65% of all individual tokenize RWA issued on the Solana network by asset count. Well, joining me as we kick off the Ondo Summit is Matt Blumberg who's head of DeFi Ondo Finance. Great to have you here. Thank you so much for joining me.

Matt: Thank you so much for having me. It's very exciting to be here. I think we're going to see a lot of really cool stuff coming out of the summit, so I'm happy to kick it off.

Remy: Yeah. So this is the second Ondo Summit taking place. So what are your expectations as we kick off the session today?

Matt: I think this year we're really going to, you know, every year I feel like we try to get our message across that the way we see tokenization is really, truly about access, right? Um, and access is not just about being able to buy assets, right. We have tokenized equities, ETFs. You know, as you mentioned, we're like the market leader there, available outside the U.S. for investors who don't have access to these assets any other way. Access is also about being able to own your assets, truly self custody them. It's about being able to use your assets the way you want, when you want. It's about being able to create new financial products and services based on these assets as this financial building block. That's really just coming to market in the last few months.

Remy: So you mentioned building blocks. I want to ask you about how you view tokenization and what role are you expected to play in the future of finance?

Matt: It's a great question. So I think the way that I sort of see it is what stablecoins did for the U.S. dollar, that's what tokenization is doing for traditional financial products and services. It's democratizing access, right? It's enabling enormous amounts of innovation coming out on top. So a lot of the use cases that we've seen for things like stablecoins, whether it's, you know, using them in decentralized lending protocols, using them in Dexs, using them in decentralized perpetual protocols, collateral, I mean, there's, you know, a whole gambit of use cases. Everywhere that stablecoins have made that possible to date, I think we really haven't seen builders empowered with the innovation that they need to be able to open that up for traditional assets, right. So I think, you know, the classic sort of use cases, if you use a traditional financial broker today, your assets are locked in. You have vendor lock in. You're living in like a walled garden, right? With tokenization, all of a sudden you have the freedom to use your assets the way you want to. And so one good example is margin. Like if you want to borrow cash against your portfolio, today that's very much restricted to either people who are willing to pay very high rates at retail brokerages or people that are like ultra high net worth individuals. You know, Elon Musk doesn't sell his Tesla stock, right? He borrows dollars against it. But as a typical user, the rates that you pay today are extremely noncompetitive. There is no competition in this market through DeFi and through tokenization. We open up a truly novel financial market for buyers and sellers, borrowers and lenders, to come together and be able to, you know, price what the risk of each of these assets is in real time. And so for the first time as a retail user, you can actually gain access to borrowing cash against your, you know, stock portfolio, um, without paying an arm and a leg in funding.

Remy: And I do want to ask you about your expectations right now when it comes to the trading day, markets- traditional markets in terms of equities- they open at 9:30 a.m. every morning, close at four. So with markets going to 24/7, what does this mean for liquidity?

Matt: An ex-equities trader, this is an enormous like depressing moment for me because now I have to work all the time again. But, you know, coming over to crypto, it was already a 24/7 market. So so you kind of become used to it. For Ondo, broadly speaking, a lot of times the limits on what we're able to offer to our users truly are the track limits, right. Um, so tokenized equities and ETFs available outside the U.S. 24 hours a day, five days a week. Everybody wants access over the weekend. You know, a lot of people are not financial professionals. They want to be able to buy and sell things over the weekend, do research, make investment decisions. And so we're really excited to see the infrastructure from traditional finance come online with 24/7 capabilities, because it opens up the world of what we're able to offer. I think for a lot of people, this is sort of the game that stands in their way when it comes to making better investment decisions. So I think we're really optimistic about our ability to sort of sit between the traditional financial sector as it comes online with these 24 over seven functionalities, and the blockchain, which already is a world that trades 24/7. And we think that our expertise will enable us to, to uniquely contribute to the liquidity there, the same way that we reflect liquidity during the week from the traditional financial markets. Now we can reflect it also over the weekend.

Remy: Yeah. And Matt, you bring up an important point, because if we just think about the first month of 2026, there have been so many market moving events, whether we're talking about equities or commodities, we've been looking at crypto to get an indication of how the trading week might start, especially given that futures don't open until 6 p.m. on Sunday when it comes to the equity markets. But your outlook for 2026, what do you expect to see unfold in the next 11 months?

Matt: I mean, it certainly feels like we're off to a very volatile start of the year. I think, you know, within my area of expertise in particular, I really think tokenized assets are at an inflection point. I think they're effectively where stablecoins were circa 2017, where we're really starting to see that hockey stick growth. I mean, we've been I've been stunned as to just how fast the market has shown us that it has demand for these things. Right. I thought for sure it would take a couple of years to really pan out and get to where we are today. I think the growth is just going to be exponential in the amount of innovation we see is going to be exponential. And I think we'll really start to see some interesting experiments when it comes to Golden Globes. 24/7 marketing.

Remy: Well, it does seem as though the events are about to kick off here at Ondo Summit, so I'll let you go. Thank you so much for joining me today, and thank you so much for sharing your insights and perspective.

Matt: Thank you so much for having me.

Remy: My pleasure.