The US equity market represents a $70 trillion opportunity, yet access to it remains challenging for many global investors.1 The core infrastructure behind traditional financial markets remains fragmented, with investors often holding assets across multiple platforms, often with limited transparency, slow settlement times, and siloed systems that restrict individual economic opportunity.2
For investors around the world, these barriers are more prominent, as access to US equities and ETFs remains limited by high fees, fragmented infrastructure, and regulatory barriers, leaving them excluded from many of the benefits of modern finance.3
At the same time, demand for tokenized equities and ETFs has surged as a response to the structural gaps in legacy finance. The Total Value Locked (TVL) for tokenized US equities has grown exponentially, approaching $2 billion as of July 2026, reflecting a significant shift in how global investors interact with institutional-grade assets.4
We recently spoke with Ian De Bode, CEO at Ondo Finance, to better understand how the Ondo ecosystem is addressing these structural gaps by bringing US equities on-chain with Ondo Stocks.
Ondo’s Origin and The Challenge of Fragmented Liquidity
Founded in 2021 by Nathan Allman, Ondo Finance is a blockchain-based financial technology company that was built to address the gaps in financial systems by (among other things) tokenizing real-world assets, including US equities. This originated from the belief that the current structural limitations are not user experience problems, but rather infrastructural issues.
“At Ondo, we believe that blockchain technology has the power to solve these challenges and build institutional-grade infrastructure to bring the world’s largest financial markets onchain,” said De Bode. “Combining the best of TradFi with the best of DeFi will dramatically improve our financial system, making it fairer, faster, and more accessible to all.”
Even with growth in tokenized US equities, existing tokenization platforms often struggle to match the efficiency of traditional markets. Many of them rely on pre-funded inventory pools that create "liquidity silos" with limited depth.5 As a result, large trades may move the price significantly, potentially leading to slippage that makes trading these assets costly. This also prevents the assets from serving as reliable collateral in the broader on-chain ecosystem.
Ondo views this as a fundamental infrastructure problem. "Building a tokenized stock platform is one thing. Building one that delivers comparable levels of slippage to traditional markets is another entirely,” added De Bode.
Bridging Traditional Markets with Onchain Systems
To solve this problem, Ondo looked to engineer the Stocks tokenized US stocks offering with liquidity already available on traditional exchanges such as the NYSE and Nasdaq, rather than relying on artificial on-chain pools.
Ondo developed the Ondo Stocks tokenization infrastructure, which leverages Alpaca’s Broker API infrastructure. This enables each tokenized stock to tap into the underlying market's existing liquidity depth via a direct connection to traditional exchanges.
Similar to traditional markets, tokenization excels when there is deep liquidity. While pool-based models can support a handful of popular assets before liquidity starts to thin, Ondo Stocks’ just-in-time liquidity model has no such ceiling. Each tokenized stock taps directly into the depth of the underlying exchange, designed to scale while maintaining execution quality. This model allows for trade executions with less than 5 basis points of slippage, even at significant volume.
Ondo Stocks now offers:
- Access to 430+ leading tokenized US stocks and ETFs, including tokenized corporate equities, broad-market ETFs, and commodity-linked products
- 24/5 trading with instant minting and redemption during market hours for all assets, along with 24/7 minting and burning for its most popular assets
- 24/7 transferability with peer-to-peer movement where permitted
- Liquidity that provides access similar to traditional exchange liquidity for on-chain investors, designed to support efficient execution with low slippage
The success of this tokenization model is evident in the platform's growth. Since September 2025, Ondo Stocks has captured roughly 70% of the TVL in tokenized US equities. Across Ondo Stocks and its tokenized Treasury product USDY, total value exceeds $3 billion.6
The scale of this growth reflects the demand for institutional quality execution. Ondo Stocks is one of the largest tokenized stocks platforms. Since launching, it has grown to over 138,000 cumulative holders, powered over $21 billion in trading volume, and was the first to surpass $1 billion in TVL, more than every other tokenized stock platform combined. With the US equity market worth $70 trillion and the infrastructure for tokenized stocks now in place, we’re just at the beginning.
"We are proud to support Ondo Stocks with our brokerage infrastructure. The growth of their platform is a testament to what they’ve built and the growing use case for tokenized US equities,” said Yoshi Yokokawa, Co-Founder and CEO of Alpaca. “Our shared goal is to design truly open and globally accessible financial services where any asset can be tokenized and moved on-chain with institutional-grade efficiency. As Ondo Stocks continues to scale globally, we look forward to working collaboratively to make that future a reality."
Architecting the Future of Onchain Prime Brokerage
The Ondo ecosystem continues to expand its offerings to increase capital efficiency and investor choice.
The Ondo Perps platform recently launched, enabling Ondo Stocks to be used as collateral for equity perpetual positions. By leveraging the spot asset liquidity on traditional exchanges via the Ondo Stocks platform, Ondo Perps aims to provide best-in-class liquidity.
Additionally, Ondo Stocks continues to expand globally and strengthen its regulatory framework. The group has filed a registration statement with the SEC to support the growth of tokenized securities markets, helping ensure it meets institutional-grade standards for security, reliability, and compliance.
The platform has also recently received regulatory approval for its European base securities prospectus, enabling it to expand access to Ondo tokenized stocks and ETFs to over 500 million investors across 30 European markets. Stocks assets also became the first to be admitted for trading on Binance under the Abu Dhabi Global Markets framework.
In the United States, Ondo Finance also has one of the most comprehensive sets of SEC registered entities for digital asset services. Ondo Finance has an SEC-registered transfer agent, investment advisor, and broker-dealer with alternative trading system capabilities.
Looking ahead, Ondo and Alpaca will continue to work together to pave the way for a reality where any asset can be moved and utilized on-chain with institutional-grade efficiency.
Contact Alpaca
Interested in learning more about Alpaca’s tokenization infrastructure? For prospective partners, please contact Alpaca’s Sales team at [email protected] or complete the form below.
For existing partners, please contact your Customer Success Manager (CSM) or email the Success team at [email protected]
References
- 15+ Stock Market Statistics for 2026 | Fortunly
- Wall Street 2.0_ Towards the Open Economy _ Ondo Finance.pdf
- Global Investors Locked Out: How Geographic and Regulatory Barriers Limit Access to Top Equity Markets | MEXC News
- RWA.xyz | Tokenized Stocks
- Asset Tokenization in Financial Markets: The Next Generation of Value Exchange P 39
- Ondo Finance
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