Ondo Chain FAQ

Ondo Chain* is a Layer 1 blockchain purpose-built to accelerate the creation of institutional-grade financial markets onchain. It combines the openness and accessibility of public blockchains with the security and compliance features required by institutional investors, enabling the seamless tokenization, trading, and use of real-world assets (RWAs) at scale.

Ondo Chain builds on almost a decade of lessons from the industry regarding the use of blockchain technology in regulated financial applications. It combines elements of permissioned enterprise blockchains, public blockchains, L2 rollups, DeFi, bridging technology, and tokenized RWAs to create infrastructure to accelerate the development of institutional-grade financial markets onchain.

There are three reasons why we ultimately decided we needed to build our own L1 to bring financial markets onchain:

1. Tightly coupling onchain and offchain infrastructure reduces costs, enhances security, and ensures low-latency operations for critical processes; these are important to ensure the type of user-experience that institutional-grade financial markets require.

2. A “public permissioned” model where financial institutions are involved in running the chain fosters security and compliance, ultimately giving these institutions more comfort in using the chain. As the goal is to bring financial markets onchain, having these institutions participate is critical because they hold the majority of the world’s investable assets.

3. Having a dedicated ecosystem built around RWAs allows for concentrated development of wallets, protocols, and applications tailored to the unique needs of financial markets. This unified focus fosters innovation, maximizes utility, and ensures that every participant in the ecosystem is aligned in advancing the use of tokenized assets.

Ondo Chain provides the same institutional-grade benefits as traditional infrastructure, then supplements it with additional features enabled by blockchain technology, including global, 24/7/365 access, near-instant settlement, and open, easy asset issuance and distribution at lower cost. Just as importantly, Ondo Chain also enables tokenized assets to be used in DeFi-powered investment services at any time.

At launch, Ondo Global Markets (Ondo GM) will offer tokenized exposure to many of the most widely traded stocks such as Apple and Tesla, and a variety of popular bonds and ETFs from leading asset managers such Fidelity and BlackRock.

While validators are permissioned and limited to select institutions, the chain maintains an open architecture that allows anyone to issue tokens, develop applications, or participate as a user or investor. Developers retain the flexibility to implement their own permissioning and transfer restrictions at the smart contract level where needed.

Beyond access to Ondo GM assets, Ondo Chain provides DeFi developers with seamless integration with traditional financial systems, built-in compliance tooling, and natively integrated cross-chain bridging, all as part of a familiar, EVM-compatible architecture. For developers wishing to build omnichain apps that utilize real-world assets, Ondo Chain will be the natural choice.

Ondo Chain will include native bridging support for both EVM and non-EVM chains⁠, including, but not limited to, Ethereum, Mantle, Arbitrum, Aptos, Sui, Solana, Plume, and the Cosmos Ecosystem, with the list continually expanding. Our goal is to ensure that Ondo Chain supports native bridging to every major public chain where RWAs will play a major role. In addition, Ondo Chain will also support connectivity into several major private, permissioned chains run by institutions, enabling access to previously inaccessible pools of liquidity.

At the time of writing, the technical design and testnet development are nearly completed and we are in conversations with institutional partners, including broker-dealers and distributors, to ensure we build a meaningful institutional ecosystem for Ondo Chain before launching mainnet.

Ondo Global Markets and Ondo Chain are deeply interconnected components of a cohesive strategy to fundamentally upgrade capital markets. Ondo Global Markets enables the seamless tokenization of any publicly traded asset, while Ondo Chain is designed to provide the institutional-grade infrastructure to enable those assets and other RWAs to be used at scale. Together, they lay the foundations for a more inclusive and efficient financial system.