Ondo Finance

Ondo Finance is an asset manager for tokenized real-world assets. Its business is taking conventional instruments — chiefly short-term US Treasuries — and issuing on-chain tokens that represent a claim on them, so investors can hold Treasury exposure in a wallet and move it like any other token. This makes Ondo different from a purely on-chain protocol such as a decentralized exchange or an automated lending market: the value ultimately sits in off-chain assets held by regulated custodians, and the token is the on-chain wrapper. Ondo was founded in 2021 by Nathan Allman and Pinku Surana, both formerly of Goldman Sachs. Following the death of founder Nathan Allman in 2026, Ian De Bode became chief executive.

Ondo's two flagship products serve different audiences. OUSG is a tokenized short-term US Treasuries fund aimed at qualified and institutional buyers, typically behind KYC and minimum-investment requirements; its underlying exposure is held through regulated funds and custodians rather than on-chain. USDY is a yield-bearing token backed by short-term Treasuries and bank deposits, offered to non-US retail users. In both cases the token is a claim on real assets held off-chain, and returns come from the interest those assets earn — a fundamentally different source of yield from a crypto-native lending pool. Because the assets and their custody live in traditional finance, redemption and transferability follow those rules, including permissioning and eligibility checks.

Ondo has not suffered a protocol exploit that drained deposits, and its assets are backed by short-term US government debt, one of the lowest-risk collateral types. But the relevant risks are not the usual smart-contract ones — they are the custody and counterparty risks of real-world assets. Because the tokens are claims on off-chain holdings kept with custodians and regulated funds, you are trusting those institutions, the fund administrators and the redemption process, not just on-chain code. If a custodian or partner fails, or redemption is paused, holders depend on the legal structure to recover value.

Other considerations follow from that structure. Products like OUSG are permissioned — KYC and eligibility gates apply — so they are not freely usable by anyone, and regulatory changes to how tokenized securities are treated could affect access. On top of the RWA structure, the ordinary crypto dangers still apply: phishing sites and malicious approval prompts target holders regardless of what backs a token. Confirm the official domain and read every approval before signing.