AI Summary
5 min readWhen Ondo tokenized SpaceX stock on Ethereum within five minutes of the NASDAQ IPO on June 12, the market reaction was immediate: early buyers were up roughly 30 percent. For Ian De Bode, Ondo's head of product, that speed was the result of a system built to tap directly into TradFi liquidity rather than relying on the on-chain liquidity pools that most competitors use. The conversation with David on Bankless digs into the mechanics of that system, the capital efficiency problem that plagues most real-world asset perps, and why Ondo believes owning the full stack—from tokenization to the perp margin engine—is the only way to make single-stock perps work at scale.
The Minting Machine: How Ondo Tokenizes Stocks in Seconds
The core insight behind Ondo's tokenized stock product is that on-chain liquidity pools are too shallow to support large trades in equities. Most competitors launch with DEX pools and end up with massive slippage on any order above a few hundred thousand dollars. Ondo instead built a just-in-time liquidity model that taps directly into the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:09) **Real World Assets Come of Age** - Ian reflects on Ondo being early to tokenized equities and now seeing the rest of crypto move into their domain.
- 2 (01:21) **SpaceX IPO: How Ondo Tokenized It in 5 Minutes** - The mechanics of minting tokenized SpaceX stock on Ethereum the same day as the NASDAQ IPO.
- 3 (03:00) **The Full Minting Process: On-Chain and Off-Chain Mechanics** - A detailed walkthrough of how a tokenized stock is created and delivered to a user.
- 4 (10:19) **Where Most Buying Happens: 80% Off-Platform** - The majority of tokenized stock trading occurs through integrated wallets and exchanges, not Ondo's own frontend.
- 5 (12:34) **Most Popular Tokenized Stocks** - The top assets by volume are Circle, Micron, and the usual Magnificent Seven names (Nvidia, Tesla).
- 6 (13:20) **Why Hold Tokenized Stocks On-Chain?** - The key advantage is DeFi composability: using tokenized stocks as collateral for margin or perps.
- 7 (14:38) **The Core Innovation: Ondo Perps with On-Chain Collateral** - The central thesis: perps on single-name equities suffer from capital inefficiency because market makers must hedge off-chain.
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
The stock market is starting to move onchain, and Ondo is one of the teams building the rails. Ian De Bode joins David to explain how Ondo brought tokenized SpaceX stock to Ethereum minutes after trading began, why tokenized equities need real market liquidity instead of shallow DEX pools, and how Ondo Perps could unlock a new generation of RWA trading by using tokenized stocks as collateral.
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TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Ondo’s RWA Moment
1:17 How SpaceX Stock Hit Ethereum in Minutes
2:57 What Actually Backs a Tokenized Stock?
4:49 The Onchain and Offchain Market Machine
10:29 Where the Demand Comes From
12:46 The Most Popular Tokenized Stocks
14:54 Why Perps Need Better Collateral
20:46 New Strategies for Onchain Asset Management
25:02 The Next 12 to 18 Months
26:14 How Big Can Perps Get?
28:46 Offshore Versus Onshore Perp Markets
32:05 Inside Ondo Perps
36:24 Why Not Build on Hyperliquid?
37:49 Launch Timeline and Early Demand
39:48 Will Wall Street Incumbents Compete or Help?
43:52 Ondo’s 2026 Roadmap
45:22 Remembering Nathan Allman
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RESOURCES
Ian De Bode
https://x.com/iandebode
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Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here:
https://www.bankless.com/disclosures
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