Five years after leaving Goldman Sachs' digital asset team to start his own business, Nathan Allman has built Ondo into a leading RWA platform with a TVL exceeding $4 billion.
Written by: ChandlerZ, Foresight News
On May 26, 2026, Ondo Finance announced on its official Twitter account the unexpected passing of its founder and CEO, Nathan Allman, and appointed longtime president Ian De Bode as CEO. The company stated in its announcement that Allman's family and loved ones would receive the full support of the company, and did not disclose further details regarding the cause of death.
The announcement also emphasized that Allman has built a senior management team capable of operating independently for the company. Ian De Bode has been in charge of the company's strategy, product, and daily operations for over two years and has received full support from management. The company clearly stated that it will continue the direction initiated by Allman.
From Goldman Sachs to the Regulatory Negotiation Table for Tokenized Securities
Nathan Allman is widely recognized as one of the core driving forces behind the RWA movement. He graduated from Brown University with a bachelor's degree in economics and biology. He then went on to pursue his MBA at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business.
In 2018, he started his own crypto hedge fund, ChainStreet Capital. In 2019, he joined Goldman Sachs' Global Markets Digital Assets business line, focusing on building cryptocurrency market services for institutional investors and leveraging blockchain infrastructure to transform the traditional securities issuance and trading processes. This experience provided a direct methodological source 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 channel connecting traditional finance with on-chain infrastructure." Ondo's core product line has developed along this path.
In its early days, Ondo focused on DeFi structured yield products. In 2023, it shifted its focus to tokenized real-world assets. The first product of this transformation was OUGG (Ondo Short-Term US Treasuries Fund). Users deposited stablecoins such as USDC, and Ondo used these funds to purchase short-term US Treasury bonds, then distributed the returns to holders in the form of tokens. At the same time, USDY packaged the returns from short-term US Treasury bonds into perpetual tokens and made them available to non-US accredited investors.
At the time, the largest tokenized government bond product on the market was BlackRock's BUIDL fund, with a minimum investment of $5 million, which was simply out of reach for ordinary investors. In early 2024, Allman made a crucial decision: integrating BUIDL into the underlying assets of OUSG, allowing Ondo users to indirectly hold BlackRock-managed government bonds through OUSG, while lowering the threshold from $5 million to $100,000 and enabling 24/7 subscription and redemption. This move solidified Ondo's position in the RWA (Retail Asset Wafer) market. Throughout 2024, Ondo's TVL (TVL) grew from $40 million to $534 million, a 13-fold increase.
Following government bonds, the next step is stocks. In September 2025, Allman launched Ondo Global Markets, expanding the tokenized assets from US Treasury bonds to US stocks and ETFs. The logic behind this product is that many global investors cannot directly buy US stocks due to geographical restrictions, account opening thresholds, or trading time differences. Ondo has turned over 260 US securities, including Apple, Nvidia, and the S&P 500 ETF, into on-chain tokens, allowing non-US 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 comes from crypto users who haven't yet tried traditional asset investment, and ETFs are the easiest entry point for them.
Ondo Global Markets' TVL surpassed $240 million within 48 hours of its launch and exceeded $1 billion eight months later, becoming the first tokenized stock platform to reach this scale. Including OUSG and USDY, the platform's total TVL once exceeded $4 billion, representing approximately 58% of the tokenized stock market.
However, the biggest obstacle to tokenized securities has never been technology, but regulation. In the United States, the issuance and trading of securities are strictly regulated by the SEC, and turning stocks into on-chain tokens falls into a legal gray area. Allman has chosen to communicate directly.
In April 2025, he led a team to meet with the SEC's Crypto Working Group to discuss a compliance framework for tokenized U.S. securities. In December of the same year, Ondo submitted a roadmap for tokenized securities to the SEC, with the core demand being formal SEC recognition of the legal status of public blockchains in the tokenized securities market, opening access for retail investors. That same month, the SEC quietly closed its confidential investigation into Ondo's tokenized U.S. Treasury bonds and ONDO tokens, without raising any charges. For a crypto company operating in a regulatory gray area, this amounted to tacit approval.
In terms of funding, Ondo has raised a total of $46 million. Founders Fund and Pantera Capital co-led Series A funding, with Coinbase Ventures, Tiger Global, and Wintertermute also participating. In July 2025, Allman and Pantera jointly established the $250 million Ondo Catalyst fund, dedicated to investing in RWA infrastructure projects.
The last few puzzle pieces left by Allman
In December 2025, Ondo Finance announced that it had submitted its tokenized securities roadmap to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), stating that direct registration, beneficial ownership, and packaged and associated securities ownership models all coexist in today's financial markets and play an important role on-chain. In its letter, Ondo urged the SEC to allow these three models by: 1. Supporting direct and intermediary ownership models; 2. Accepting permissioned, permissionless, and hybrid blockchains; providing targeted regulatory clarity for transfer agent-based tokenization; and 3. Allowing broader tokenization of securities held in DTCs.
In the weeks leading up to Allman's death, Ondo accomplished several things that no one in the industry had ever done before.
On May 6, Ondo Finance's official blog disclosed that it had partnered with Kinexys by JP Morgan, Mastercard, and Ripple to complete the first near-real-time cross-border, interbank redemption of tokenized US Treasury funds. Traditional cross-border securities redemption processes typically take several days, involving investors submitting redemption requests, custodian banks confirming holdings, initiating fund transfers through interbank networks such as SWIFT, and multiple intermediaries confirming each transaction.
In this pilot project, Ripple redeemed its Ondo Short-Term U.S. Government Bonds (OUSG) held on the XRP Ledger. After processing the redemption, Ondo sent a fiat currency payment instruction through the Mastercard Multi-Token Network, with the funds settlement executed by the blockchain infrastructure of Kinexys by JP Morgan and the USD funds delivered to Ripple's bank account in Singapore through its correspondent banking network.
Ondo also received a No-Action Letter from the SEC, clearing compliance hurdles for its issuance of tokenized securities on Ethereum. The official statement indicates that Ondo's application is limited in scope, and the OGM product positioning remains unchanged: tokenized notes offering exposure to US stocks and ETFs to non-US investors. The underlying securities and official ledger records remain within the existing custody system, held by custodian BitGo. The core change lies in simultaneously recording the relevant securities rights in tokenized form on the Ethereum mainnet under limited circumstances to optimize collateral monitoring, subscription and redemption processes, and reconciliation operations.
On May 5th, the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) announced that its tokenization service has partnered with over 50 financial institutions to include Ondo in its tokenized securities alliance, alongside BlackRock and Goldman Sachs. This service will support the tokenization of RWA held in DTC's custody, providing the same rights and investor protections as traditional tokens. DTCC plans to launch limited production trading in July 2026 and officially launch the service in October.
A five-year-old crypto-native team with a list of partners including JP Morgan, BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, DTCC, and Mastercard. While numerous projects in the RWA sector are tokenizing, Ondo is practically the only one simultaneously sitting at the negotiating table with the SEC and in the DTCC alliance. The establishment of these partnerships is inextricably linked to Allman's personal efforts.
The successor has been in office for two years
In his announcement, Ondo said that Allman helped them build a durable organization, a statement that specifically refers to his successor, Ian De Bode.
Prior to joining Ondo, De Bode was the Global Head of Digital Assets at McKinsey, with over a decade of experience in institutional digital transformation within the consulting industry. He also holds an MBA from Stanford and joined Ondo as Chief Strategy Officer in late 2023, rising to President in November 2025. For the past two years, he has been leading the company's strategy, product development, and day-to-day operations. Ondo's announcement specifically emphasized that De Bode has earned the "full trust" of the management team.
For a crypto company, the immediate takeover by a successor who has served for over two years and is familiar with all aspects of the business following the unexpected death of the founder is extremely rare. Crypto projects often heavily rely on the founder's personal influence and community appeal; the founder's departure usually signifies directional risk and a crisis of trust. However, the challenges Allman leaves behind are clear: his personal network of relationships with regulators and Wall Street institutions, built by personally leading negotiations with the SEC last April, is something De Bode needs to prove it can handle.
ONDO tokens fell about 6% after the news was released, currently trading at $0.413. The market reaction was relatively restrained, with no panic selling.
There were no publicly available records of health problems at the time of Allman's death; Ondo's announcement used the phrase "unexpected passing," without disclosing the specific cause. The DTCC tokenized securities pilot in July was a new milestone in his plans, but he will not live to see it go live.
