After leaving Goldman Sachs’ digital asset team and starting his own business for five years, Nathan Allman turned Ondo into a leading platform for real-world assets (RWA) with a total value locked (TVL) exceeding $4 billion.

Written by: ChandlerZ, Foresight News

Ondo Finance announced on its official Twitter on May 26, 2026, that founder and CEO Nathan Allman had passed away unexpectedly, and appointed long-time president Ian De Bode as CEO. The company stated in the announcement that Allman’s family and close relatives would receive full support from the company and did not disclose further details regarding the cause of death.

The announcement also emphasized that Allman had built a senior management team capable of independent operations. Ian De Bode has effectively been responsible for the company’s strategy, product development, and daily operations for over two years and has received full support from the management team. The company clearly stated that it would continue the direction initiated by Allman.

From Goldman Sachs to the Negotiation Table for Tokenized Securities

Nathan Allman is recognized as one of the core drivers in the RWA sector. He graduated from Brown University with a degree in economics and biology. He then attended Stanford University’s business school for his MBA.

In 2018, he operated his own crypto hedge fund, ChainStreet Capital. In 2019, he joined Goldman Sachs' Global Markets Division in the digital asset business line, focusing on building cryptocurrency market services for institutional investors and transforming the issuance and trading processes of traditional securities using blockchain infrastructure. This experience provided him with a direct methodological source for his later product design, and 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.” The core product line of Ondo developed along this path.

In its early days, Ondo focused on decentralized finance structured yield products, and in 2023, it shifted its direction toward tokenizing real-world assets. The first product of this transformation was OUSG (Ondo Short-Term US Treasuries Fund), where users deposited stablecoins like USDC, and Ondo used these funds to purchase short-term US government bonds, distributing the returns in token form to holders; at the same time, USDY packaged the returns from short-term US bonds into perpetual tokens, accessible to non-US accredited investors.

At that time, the largest tokenized government bond product on the market was BlackRock’s BUIDL fund, with a minimum investment of $5 million, which ordinary investors could not reach. In early 2024, Allman made a key decision to integrate BUIDL into the underlying assets of OUSG, allowing Ondo users to indirectly hold US Treasuries managed by BlackRock through OUSG, while lowering the threshold from $5 million to $100,000 and enabling 24/7 redemptions. This step allowed Ondo to solidify its position in the RWA sector. Over the course of 2024, Ondo’s TVL grew from $40 million to $534 million, an increase of 13 times.

After government bonds, the next focus was on stocks. In September 2025, Allman launched Ondo Global Markets, expanding the tokenized assets from US government bonds to US stocks and ETFs. The logic of this product is that many global investors, due to geographical restrictions, account opening thresholds, or time zone differences, are unable to directly buy US stocks. Ondo tokenized over 260 US securities, including Apple, Nvidia, and the S&P 500 ETF, allowing non-US users to trade these tokenized versions on Solana, Ethereum, and BNB Chain 24 hours a day. In an interview with CNBC, Allman stated that much of the demand came from crypto users who had not yet tried traditional asset investments, and ETFs were the easiest entry point for them.

Ondo Global Markets surpassed $240 million in TVL within 48 hours of launch and reached over $1 billion eight months later, becoming the first tokenized stock platform to achieve this scale. Combined with OUSG and USDY, the entire platform’s TVL at one point exceeded $4 billion, capturing about 58% of the tokenized stock market.

However, the biggest obstacle faced by tokenized securities has never been technology; it is regulation. In the US, the issuance and trading of securities are strictly regulated by the SEC, placing chain-based stocks in a legal gray area. The path Allman chose was direct communication.

In April 2025, he led a team to meet with the SEC's cryptocurrency working group to discuss compliance frameworks for tokenized US securities. In December of the same year, Ondo submitted a roadmap for tokenized securities to the SEC, emphasizing the need for the SEC to formally recognize the legal status of public chains in the tokenized securities market, opening a path for retail investors. In the same month, the SEC quietly closed its confidential investigation into Ondo’s tokenized US Treasuries and ONDO tokens, without making any allegations. For a cryptocurrency company operating in a regulatory gray area, this amounted to receiving tacit approval.

In terms of financing, Ondo raised a total of $46 million, with Founders Fund and Pantera Capital jointly leading Series A, and Coinbase Ventures, Tiger Global, and Wintermute following. In July 2025, Allman and Pantera jointly established a $250 million Ondo Catalyst fund specifically for RWA infrastructure projects.

The Last Few Pieces Left by Allman

In December 2025, Ondo Finance announced that it had submitted its roadmap for tokenized securities to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), stating: direct registration, beneficial ownership, and ownership modes of packaged and associated securities coexist in today’s financial market and play important roles on-chain. In the letter, Ondo urged the SEC to allow these three modes by: 1. supporting direct and intermediary ownership models; 2. accepting licensed, unlicensed, and hybrid blockchains; 3. providing targeted regulatory clarity for tokenization based on transfer agents; 4. allowing broader tokenization of securities deposited with DTC.

In the weeks before Allman's passing, Ondo accomplished several unprecedented tasks in the industry.

On May 6, Ondo Finance's official blog revealed that it had partnered with Kinexys by J.P. Morgan, Mastercard, and Ripple to complete the first nearly real-time cross-border interbank exchange of a tokenized US government bond fund. Traditional processes for redeeming cross-border securities typically take several days, where investors submit redemption requests, custodial banks confirm holdings, and initiate fund transfers through interbank networks like SWIFT, with multiple intermediaries confirming step by step.

In this pilot project, Ripple exchanged its Ondo short-term US government bonds (OUSG) held on the XRP Ledger. After processing the exchange, Ondo sent fiat payment instructions via Mastercard Multi-Token Network, with the blockchain infrastructure of Kinexys by J.P. Morgan executing the fund settlement, and USD delivery to Ripple's bank account in Singapore via its agency network.

During the same period, Ondo obtained an SEC no-action letter, clearing compliance obstacles for its issuance of tokenized securities on Ethereum. Officially, Ondo stated that this application had a limited scope, with the OGM product positioning remaining unchanged, still providing tokenized notes for non-US investors with exposure to US stocks and ETFs, with underlying securities and official ledger records maintained within the existing custodial system, held by custodian BitGo. The core change is that, under limited circumstances, relevant securities rights would be synchronously recorded in tokenized form on the Ethereum mainnet to optimize collateral monitoring, subscription and redemption processes, and reconciliation operations.

On May 5, the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) announced that its DTC tokenization service had begun collaborations with over 50 financial institutions, incorporating Ondo into its tokenized securities alliance alongside BlackRock and Goldman Sachs. This service will support the tokenization of RWAs held in DTC, providing the same rights and investor protection as traditional forms. The DTCC plans to launch the first batch of limited production trades in July 2026 and officially launch the service in October.

A five-year-old crypto-native team has a partner list that includes J.P. Morgan, BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, DTCC, and Mastercard. Numerous projects are tokenizing in the RWA sector, but few can sit at the SEC's negotiation table and in the DTCC alliance simultaneously; almost only Ondo can do that. The establishment of these partnerships is closely tied to Allman's personal efforts.

The Successor Has Been in Position for Two Years

Ondo stated in the announcement that Allman built a durable organization for them, which specifically refers to successor Ian De Bode.

Before joining Ondo, De Bode was the global head of McKinsey’s digital asset business, having worked for over a decade in institutional digital transformation in the consulting industry. He also holds an MBA from Stanford and joined Ondo as Chief Strategy Officer at the end of 2023, rising to president in November 2025, and has been leading the company’s strategy, products, and daily operations for over two years. Ondo's announcement particularly emphasized that De Bode has gained "full trust" from the management team.

For a crypto company, having a successor who has been in place for more than two years and is familiar with all the business immediately take over after the founder’s unexpected passing is extremely rare. Projects in the crypto industry often rely heavily on the founder’s personal influence and community appeal, and a founder's departure typically signals directional risks and a crisis of trust. However, the challenges left by Allman are also clear; he personally led a team to negotiate with the SEC last April, and the personal network of relationships he accumulated in collaborating with regulators and Wall Street institutions is what De Bode needs to prove he can handle.

The ONDO token fell about 6% after the news was announced, currently reported at $0.413. The market response was relatively restrained, with no panic selling.

At the time of Allman's passing, there were no public health issues recorded. Ondo’s announcement used the term "unexpected passing" without disclosing specific reasons. The DTCC tokenization securities pilot planned for July was a new milestone he had envisioned, but he would not see it launched.