David Wells, chief executive of Ondo Perps, the perpetual futures exchange run by Ondo Finance, said on the 6th that tokenized stocks will eventually be used as collateral to improve capital efficiency.
Wells said the tokenized-stock-backed derivatives platform, the first of its kind launched by Ondo Finance, has drawn cumulative trading volume approaching $15 billion in the two months since its debut.
Ondo Finance is a financial platform that offers U.S. stocks and exchange-traded funds as blockchain-based tokens. On Ondo Perps, investors can post tokenized stocks as collateral and trade perpetual futures around the clock on underlying assets including equities, ETFs and commodities. Perpetual futures are derivatives that have no expiration date and allow investors to bet on rises or falls in the price of an underlying asset.
"Unlike existing perpetual futures exchanges, which mainly accept dollar-pegged stablecoins such as USD Coin as margin, Ondo Perps allows tokenized stocks themselves to be used as margin," Wells said. An investor can pledge tokenized Tesla shares as collateral, rather than selling them for USDC, and then take a position in Nvidia perpetual futures. That goes a step beyond buying and selling stock tokens around the clock, putting them to work in other investments.
Ondo is widening its points of contact with the Korean market. "Products using SK hynix as the underlying asset are popular," Wells said. "We will reflect investment demand for Korean assets in our product development."
Ondo Finance earlier agreed with Kakao Pay Securities to jointly study overseas distribution of Korean listed stocks and tokenization infrastructure. Wells drew a line, however, saying there are no plans yet for a direct link between Kakao Pay Securities and Ondo Perps.
