Original Author: ChandlerZ, Foresight News
On May 26, 2026, Ondo Finance announced via its official Twitter account that its founder and CEO, Nathan Allman, had passed away unexpectedly. The company appointed its long-serving President, Ian De Bode, as the new CEO. The announcement stated that Allman's family and loved ones would receive the company's full support, but no further details regarding the cause of death were disclosed.
The announcement also emphasized that Allman had built a management team capable of independent operation. Ian De Bode had been effectively responsible for the company's strategy, products, and daily operations for over two years and had received the full backing of the management team. The company made clear its intention to continue in the direction Allman had set.
From Goldman Sachs to the Regulatory Negotiation Table for Tokenized Securities
Nathan Allman was widely recognized as a core driving force in the RWA (Real World Assets) sector. He earned his bachelor's degree from Brown University, majoring in Economics and Biology, before pursuing an MBA at Stanford Graduate School of Business.
In 2018, he ran his own crypto hedge fund, ChainStreet Capital. In 2019, he joined Goldman Sachs' Digital Asset business within the Global Markets Division, focusing on building cryptocurrency market services for institutional investors and using blockchain infrastructure to transform the issuance and trading processes of traditional securities. This experience provided a direct methodological foundation for his later product designs. 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 and on-chain infrastructure." Ondo's core product lines were developed along this path.
Initially, Ondo focused on DeFi structured yield products. In 2023, it pivoted towards tokenizing real-world assets. Its first product after this shift was OUSG (Ondo Short-Term US Treasuries Fund). Users could deposit stablecoins like USDC, which Ondo would then use to purchase short-term U.S. Treasury bonds, distributing the returns to holders in token form. USDY, another product, packaged the yields from short-term Treasuries into a perpetual token, made available to non-U.S. accredited investors.
At the time, the largest tokenized Treasury product on the market was BlackRock's BUIDL fund, which had a minimum investment of $5 million—far out of reach for ordinary investors. In early 2024, Allman made a key decision to integrate BUIDL into OUSG's underlying assets. This allowed Ondo users to indirectly hold Treasuries managed by BlackRock through OUSG, while lowering the investment threshold from $5 million to $100,000 and enabling 24/7 subscriptions and redemptions. This move solidified Ondo's position in the RWA space. Throughout 2024, Ondo's Total Value Locked (TVL) grew from $40 million to $534 million, a 13-fold increase.
Following Treasuries came stocks. In September 2025, Allman launched Ondo Global Markets, expanding the tokenized assets from U.S. Treasuries to U.S. stocks and ETFs. The logic behind this product was that a large number of global investors were unable to directly invest in U.S. stocks due to geographical restrictions, account opening barriers, or trading time zone differences. Ondo created on-chain tokens representing over 260 U.S. securities, including Apple, NVIDIA, and S&P 500 ETFs, enabling non-U.S. users to trade these tokenized versions 24/7 on Solana, Ethereum, and BNB Chain. In an interview with CNBC, Allman stated that much of the demand came from crypto users who hadn't yet ventured into traditional asset investing, with ETFs being their easiest entry point.
Ondo Global Markets saw its TVL exceed $240 million within 48 hours of launch, and it surpassed $1 billion within eight months, becoming the first tokenized stock platform to reach that scale. Combined with OUSG and USDY, the platform's total TVL at one point exceeded $4 billion, capturing about 58% of the tokenized stock market.
However, the biggest obstacle for tokenized securities was never technology, but regulation. In the United States, the issuance and trading of securities are strictly regulated by the SEC, and turning stocks into on-chain tokens operates in a legal gray area. Allman's chosen path was direct engagement.
In April 2025, he led a team to meet with the SEC's Crypto Working Group to discuss a compliant framework for tokenized U.S. securities. In December of the same year, Ondo submitted a tokenized securities roadmap to the SEC, with a core request for the SEC to formally recognize the legal status of public blockchains in the tokenized securities market, thereby opening channels for retail investors. That same month, the SEC quietly closed its confidential investigation into Ondo's tokenized U.S. Treasuries and the ONDO token without bringing any charges. For a crypto company operating in a regulatory gray area, this amounted to receiving a tacit approval.
In terms of funding, Ondo raised a total of $46 million. Founders Fund and Pantera Capital jointly led the Series A round, with Coinbase Ventures, Tiger Global, and Wintermute participating. In July 2025, Allman and Pantera jointly established the $250 million Ondo Catalyst Fund, dedicated to investing in RWA infrastructure projects.
The Final Pieces of the Puzzle Left by Allman
In December 2025, Ondo Finance announced that it had submitted its tokenized securities roadmap to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Ondo stated that direct registration, beneficial ownership, and wrapped/associated security ownership models all coexist in today's financial markets and play important roles on-chain. In the letter, Ondo urged the SEC to allow these three models by: 1. Supporting both direct and intermediary ownership models; 2. Accepting permissioned, permissionless, and hybrid blockchains; 3. Providing targeted regulatory clarity for tokenization based on transfer agents; 4. Allowing broader tokenization of securities deposited at DTC.
In the weeks preceding Allman's passing, Ondo successively accomplished several industry-first feats.
On May 6, Ondo Finance's official blog disclosed that it, in collaboration with Kinexys by J.P. Morgan, Mastercard, and Ripple, had completed the first near real-time cross-border, cross-bank redemption of a tokenized U.S. Treasury fund. Traditional cross-border security redemption processes typically take several days, involving investors submitting redemption requests, custodian banks confirming holdings, initiating fund transfers via interbank networks like SWIFT, and multiple intermediaries confirming step-by-step.
In this pilot project, Ripple redeemed its holdings of Ondo Short-Term US Government Bonds (OUSG) on the XRP Ledger. After processing the redemption, Ondo sent fiat payment instructions via the Mastercard Multi-Token Network. Kinexys by J.P. Morgan's blockchain infrastructure executed the fund settlement and delivered USD funds to Ripple's bank account in Singapore through its correspondent banking network.
Concurrently, Ondo received a No-Action Letter from the SEC, clearing the compliance path for issuing tokenized securities on Ethereum. Ondo officially stated that the scope of this application was limited, with the OGM product's positioning unchanged—it remains tokenized notes providing non-U.S. investors with exposure to U.S. stocks and ETFs. The underlying securities and official book records are maintained within the existing custody system, held by custodian BitGo. The core change is that, under limited circumstances, the relevant security interests can be synchronously recorded in tokenized form on the Ethereum mainnet to optimize collateral monitoring, subscription/redemption processes, and reconciliation operations.
On May 5, The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) announced that its DTC Tokenization Service was collaborating with over 50 financial institutions, including Ondo, in a tokenized securities alliance alongside BlackRock and Goldman Sachs. The service will support the tokenization of RWAs held at DTC, providing exactly the same rights and investor protections as traditional forms. DTCC plans to initiate the first limited production transactions in July 2026 and formally launch the service in October.
A crypto-native team founded just five years prior now has a partner list featuring J.P. Morgan, BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, DTCC, and Mastercard. While many projects in the RWA space are involved in tokenization, only Ondo has managed to simultaneously sit at both the SEC's negotiation table and within DTCC's alliance. The establishment of these partnerships was inseparable from Allman's personal efforts.
The Successor Has Been in Place for Two Years
In its announcement, Ondo stated that Allman had helped them build a durable organization. The concrete meaning of this statement points to the successor, Ian De Bode.
Before joining Ondo, De Bode was the Global Head of Digital Assets at McKinsey & Company, having spent over a decade in consulting on institutional digital transformation. He also holds an MBA from Stanford. He joined Ondo as Chief Strategy Officer at the end of 2023, was promoted to President in November 2025, and had been leading the company's strategy, products, and daily operations for over two years. Ondo's announcement specifically emphasized that De Bode had the "full trust" of the management team.
For a crypto company, it is extremely rare to have a successor who has been in place for over two years, is familiar with all aspects of the business, and can take over immediately upon the founder's unexpected death. Crypto projects are often highly reliant on the founder's personal influence and community appeal; the departure of a founder typically signals directional risks and a crisis of trust. However, the test left by Allman is also clear. He personally led the team in negotiations with the SEC last April. The personal relationship networks he accumulated with regulators and Wall Street institutions are something De Bode will need to prove he can inherit.
The ONDO token fell approximately 6% following the announcement and is currently trading around $0.413. The market reaction has been relatively restrained, with no signs of panic selling.
There were no publicly recorded health issues for Allman at the time of his death. Ondo's announcement used the term "unexpected passing" and did not disclose specific reasons. The DTCC tokenized securities pilot scheduled for July was a new milestone he had planned, but he will not see it go live.
