There is no good way to begin a post like this, and we've started it more than once. This past week, our founder, Nate Allman, passed away, suddenly, and far too young. He was 32.
In a moment like this, the instinct is to say everything at once, or nothing at all. There will be a time to express everything Nate meant to us; this isn't quite that. What I want to do here is tell you the truth about where we are: how this week has gone, what Nate built, and how Ondo is going to keep moving forward. That is how we know to make Nate proud. Or as he would say: Onward.
The Week
We learned the news last Monday. There is no way to be ready for a call like that. Only days before, we had held our annual company offsite, where many of us had been talking to Nate; the distance between that and this was impossible to comprehend. The senior leadership team got on the phone right away, first to make sense of what had happened, and second to make sure Nate's family had everything they needed. Soon we were all on calls together, through that day and the days following, doing the two things that had to happen at once: taking care of each other, and taking care of the company Nate built.
We knew that Nate would want us to continue to execute with excellence. I’m extremely proud of how quickly the team moved during this time to inform our partners, clients and investors. But that is not what I'll remember about last week. What I'll remember is the people. How fast everyone at Ondo showed up for one another, how many stories surfaced, and how much of who Nate was lives on in the team he built. He was an extraordinary founder and mentor, and someone whose humility and brilliance deeply shaped all of us at Ondo. He was the most unique blend of unbridled ambition with an uncanny humility, very uncommon in crypto.
The response from outside Ondo was just as overwhelming. For days, it felt as though the whole industry stopped to talk about him. Tens of thousands of posts and messages from holders, founders, regulators, partners, journalists, and builders around the world. What struck me most was the breadth of it. Tributes came not only from close partners and friends, but from people across the industry who had every reason to see us as competition, and who set that aside entirely to say what Nate had meant to them and to the industry. People who knew him well wrote about his intelligence and his genuine kindness. People who had only sparred with him professionally wrote about his character. More than one person described the same image of Nate they couldn't shake, eyes closed in his profile photo, thinking, envisioning what came next, and pledged to keep carrying the work forward. One writer called him the "Johnny Appleseed" of this industry, someone who didn't just talk about tokenizing the world's financial markets but who actually planted the things that made it real, and whose work would keep growing long after him. We've read every message. They've meant more than we can say.
Two Feet on the Gas Pedal
I cannot adequately describe how hard this week has been for those of us who worked beside Nate every day. And whatever we are feeling, we know it does not begin to approach what his family is going through.
Early in the week, I spoke with Nate's mother. With a strength I will not soon forget, at a moment when no one would have faulted her for taking time for herself, she was thinking about us. About Nate's team, and about the thing her son had given so much of himself to build.
I told her not to worry about Ondo. Nate had built an incredible leadership team around him over the years. Nate was also exceptionally clear in his vision. We all know what to do to make him proud, and Ondo is the last thing she should have to worry about. She paused. Then, with a resolve that reminded me of Nate’s, she said something I’ll never forget: "Two feet on the gas pedal. That is what Nate would have wanted."
It was, in the hardest imaginable moment, exactly what Nate would have said. He built this company to do something that mattered, and he would have wanted us to keep building it. We will honor him by continuing what he started. And we will win.
The Team Nate Built
Nate was a rare kind of product mind. He worked at the intersection of four things that almost never live in one person: a deep understanding of how traditional financial markets actually function, real fluency in blockchain technology, an instinct for what users needed, and sharp commercial judgment. That combination is why Ondo's products didn't just exist; they were better. OUSG was the first peer-to-peer transferable tokenized treasury token. Flux Finance was the first onchain repo market. USDY was the first permissionless yieldcoin, opening the US Treasury rate to investors around the world. And when we built Ondo Stocks, we designed it for deep, real liquidity and TradFi execution prices to avoid our stocks depegging in the secondary market - a real problem with other providers. Again and again, Nate saw where this industry was going before almost anyone else, and built the thing that got us there.
Yet for all of that product brilliance, Nate's most important work was not any single product. It was the company itself and the people in it.
From early on, he was deliberate about surrounding Ondo with operators who had built and run things at scale, leaders from across traditional finance and the best of crypto, people who had already shipped the kind of infrastructure the rest of the industry now depends on. He did this on purpose. He wanted Ondo to be larger and more durable than any one person, himself included.
That is why this moment is a continuation, not a reset. I've had the privilege of leading much of Ondo's strategy and day-to-day operations for more than two years, alongside a leadership team that is, in my experience, second to none. David Chen, one of our earliest backers and a longtime advisor and friend to Nate, is joining our board. Every other leader remains exactly where they were. The roadmap we are executing is the roadmap Nate set.
I am stepping into the role of CEO with a clear sense of what it is: a responsibility to Nate, to his family, to this team, and to the mission we all share.
The Mission Has Not Changed
When Nate started Ondo, the idea was simple, and at the time, contrarian. The world's financial markets are one of humanity's great achievements, and they are also slow, expensive, fragmented, and closed to most of the people on the planet. Our mission has always been to change that: to make the financial system genuinely accessible to everyone.
Technology is how we get there. Blockchains, in particular, have been the most powerful tool we've ever had for the job, making it possible to hold assets without a custodian, transact without an intermediary, and build financial products without asking permission. Those properties are profound, and they remain foundational to everything we build.
And we've turned that idea into something real. Today Ondo is the undisputed leader in tokenized real-world assets. We're approaching $4 billion in assets onchain, a milestone that would have sounded improbable not long ago and that reflects how quickly this category is maturing. Ondo tokenized Treasuries and yieldcoins opened up the US dollar and the risk-free rate to investors around the world. Ondo Stocks, the leading tokenized stocks and ETFs platform, brought public equities onchain at scale with prices and liquidity comparable to brokerage accounts. And Ondo’s distribution network is unmatched across the world’s most popular exchanges, wallets, blockchains, and DeFi protocols to make those assets genuinely accessible.
We have built the most powerful tokenization engine that can put any publicly listed asset onchain, in size, with prices and liquidity comparable to brokerage accounts. We have built a distribution network that spans hundreds of millions of investors. And we have built a brand that stands for institutional-grade security, execution, and trust.
But that was never the destination. It was just the first step.
What Comes Next
With that foundation in place, Ondo is moving up the stack: toward the trading, prime brokerage, and asset management layers that turn tokenized assets into a complete financial system, open to anyone, including agents. To really take onchain financial services to the next level, investors need access to two things: leverage (for active traders) and customized portfolios (for more passive holders). Over time, these platforms combined will enable investors, or agents on their behalf, to invest in whatever and however they so desire: spot assets, or leverage, or portfolios that combine stocks, ETFs, crypto, commodities, and even prediction markets. This is the future of financial services, as Nate has laid it out, and one that we have been building towards from inception.
We are also building out the infrastructure that can power these platforms. In the next few days, we'll share the next major step in our thinking about how to continue to improve the accessibility of markets, a meaningful evolution of the infrastructure we've been building, and the foundation for much of what comes next. We'll have a great deal more to say about it soon.
That infrastructure is what will power the upcoming launch of Ondo Perps, the first perpetuals platform built for real-world assets, letting tokenized RWAs serve as collateral with deep, 24/7 liquidity. We've shared the plan for Perps already, and the platform will go live in the next few weeks.
The opportunity ahead of us is enormous: more than $160 trillion in liquid assets exist in the world today, and less than one-hundredth of one percent of them are onchain. We are still early, and there is an enormous amount left to build.
Onward
Nate often signed off his blog posts with a single word: Onward. It wasn't a slogan. It was how he was built: always forward, never quite satisfied, certain the best was still ahead.
We are grieving, and we will be for a long time. But we are not slowing down, because slowing down would honor neither what Nate built nor what his family has asked of us. Two feet on the gas pedal.
Nate, thank you for the vision, the standard you held us to, and the company you trusted us to carry forward. We will make you proud.
Onward.
Ian De Bode
Chief Executive Officer, Ondo Finance
