Overview
Introduction
OUSG (Ondo Short-Term US Government Treasuries) provides liquid exposure to short-term US Treasuries with 24/7 tokenized subscriptions and redemptions. Investing in US Treasury bills is an ultra low-risk investment option that delivers a stable return while offering deep liquidity. US Treasury bills are widely considered to be the lowest-risk and most liquid investment options available. These characteristics make them an attractive investment option for investors who are seeking safety, stability, and liquidity.
The significant majority of this portfolio is currently in the BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL), with the remainder in BlackRock’s FedFund (TFDXX), bank deposits, and USDC for liquidity purposes. The portfolio may, in the future, include other US Treasury funds and/or direct investments in US Treasuries. OUSG shares are tokenized and can be transferred 24/7.
Key Features:
- Instant, 24/7/365 Minting & Redemption. When you invest with USDC via our website, you will immediately receive OUSG tokens to the same wallet address from which you invested. You will also be able to redeem your OUSG tokens for USDC instantly as well. For security reasons and subject to the limitations of our service partners, the amount you can instantly mint or redeem in any given 24-hour time period will be limited to the amounts shown on our website; over time, we will be actively working to increase these limits*.
- Low Minimum Investment and Redemption Amounts. For instant transactions, the minimum amount is $10,000 for both investments and redemptions. For non-instant transactions, our minimum investment and redemption amounts remain at $100K and $50K, respectively.
- Accumulating (OUSG) and Rebasing (rOUSG) Versions. OUSG comes in two versions: an “accumulating” version (OUSG), and a “rebasing” version (rOUSG) that stays at a price of 1 USD. Whereas the price of OUSG goes up over time as the value of the underlying assets increase, with rOUSG you simply receive more rOUSG in your wallet; in effect the yield on the underlying assets is “paid out” in the form of additional rOUSG tokens. For example, if you held 100 rOUSG tokens and the price of OUSG was $1.00, which then increased to $1.01, the price of rOUSG would remain at $1.00, but your wallet would now hold 101 rOUSG tokens. This ‘rebasing’ happens automatically when we update the OUSG price, which we will do each business day.
| OUSG | rOUSG | |
|---|---|---|
| Token Type | Accumulating | Rebasing (distributing) |
| Yield Distribution Profile | Reflected through an increasing redemption price (NAV per share) | Distributed as additional rOUSG tokens daily |
| As Treasury Yield Accrues, the Token Price | Increases | Remains at $1.00 |
| Best Suited for | Buy-and-hold cash management (some custodians only support accumulating tokens), collateral in smart contracts | Yield-bearing means of settlement or exchange |
- Easy, Instant OUSG rOUSG Conversion. You can easily and instantly convert back and forth between OUSG and rOUSG on our website at any time.
- Waived Management Fee. Our management fee for OUSG remains low at 0.15%. These fees have been waived until Jan 1, 2025.
*For amounts that exceed the daily instant-mint or instant-redeem limit, you can always submit ‘non-instant’ subscription and redemption requests by contacting us at support@ondo.finance.
Any investor eligible to invest in any of our Qualified Access Funds (and who has completed onboarding) may invest in OUSG or rOUSG. OUSG and rOUSG tokens may be freely transferred between any investors that have already onboarded to our Qualified Access Funds.
How It Works
Say you want to make an instant investment of 100K USDC for OUSG. When you make the deposit, our smart contract automatically take two actions:
- First, it determines how many OUSG tokens you should receive. The number of OUSG tokens you receive is determined by converting the stablecoins you deposit to USD equivalents (1 USDC = $1.00 USD), and then dividing that amount by the current Net Asset Value (NAV) of the OUSG token. For example, if you deposited 100K USDC worth $100K USD and the NAV was $100/token, you would receive $100,000 / $100 = 1,000 OUSG.
- Second, it routes your deposited USDC to the Fund’s Coinbase account. Those funds are then used to purchase OUSG’s underlying holdings.
At the end of each Business Day, we update the Net Asset Value (NAV) of the Fund based upon the performance of the underlying investments, along with any accrued fees and/or expenses. The NAV per OUSG Token is then calculated by dividing the NAV of OUSG share class by the total number of OUSG tokens. We then update the OUSG Price Oracle onchain to reflect this updated NAV. Finally, this update of the OUSG price automatically triggers a rebase of the rOUSG tokens, with the updated balance automatically being reflected in your wallet (if you are holding any rOUSG).
When you request an instant redemption of your OUSG tokens, a similar process occurs in reverse. The number of USDC you receive in return for your OUSG is determined by multiplying the number of OUSG you redeem by the then-current NAV (giving a USD value), and then sending the equivalent number of USDC at a fixed value of $1.00 USD per USDC.
Understanding rOUSG
rOUSG = A Type of ‘Wrapped’ OUSG
It’s important to understand that each rOUSG still corresponds to some amount of “regular” OUSG that is locked in a wrapper contract. For example, let’s say you wanted to make an instant investment of 100K USDC into rOUSG. All of the steps in the above example still hold — the only difference is that, instead of the OUSG tokens being sent to your wallet, they are instead sent into a rOUSG wrapper contract. This wrapper contract then locks the OUSG in the contract, mints the corresponding amount of rOUSG, and send that rOUSG to your wallet. For example, if you had 1,000 OUSG tokens worth $100 each — so a total of $100,000 of value — the 1,000 OUSG would be locked in the wrapper contract, which would then mint 100,000 rOUSG tokens and then send those to your wallet. Conversely, if you wanted to redeem your rOUSG tokens, our main contract would first route the rOUSG tokens to the wrapper contract. This wrapper would then burn the rOUSG tokens and “unlock” the corresponding number of OUSG tokens. These OUSG tokens would be sent back to the OUSG contract, which would then burn them and send you the appropriate amount of USDC.
This means that the total supply of OUSG is comprised of two ‘types’ of OUSG:
- Wrapped OUSG - i.e. OUSG that is locked in the rOUSG wrapper contract and corresponds to the ‘reserve’ for the corresponding issued rOUSG.
- Non-Wrapped OUSG — i.e. OUSG that isn’t locked in the rOUSG wrapper contract.
There are three important implications of this:
- The “dollar value” that is represented by all rOUSG tokens is exactly equal to the amount of “dollar value” represented by all wrapped OUSG tokens. In other words,
NetAssetValue_rOUSG = NetAssetValue_Wrapped_OUSG→NetAssetValue_rOUSG = Num_Wrapped_OUSG_Tokens * NAV_per_OUSG(NAV = Net Asset Value = the total value of the assets backing the token, after accounting for expenses and liabilities; you can think of the “NAV per token” as the “price” or value of each token) - Because of this, if you were to add up the total amount of OUSG and the amount of rOUSG, you would be double counting the value of the wrapped OUSG, because some of that value is already represented by the rOUSG.
- Therefore, to properly calculate the NAV of the OUSG share class, the appropriate calculation is as follows:
Total OUSG Share Class Net Asset Value (e.g. both versions) = Num_rOUSG_Tokens * $1.00 + Num_Non-Wrapped_OUSG_Tokens * NAV_per_OUSG
OR
Total OUSG Share Class Net Asset Value (e.g. both versions) = (Num_Wrapped_OUSG_Tokens + Num_Non-Wrapped_OUSG_Tokens_ * NAV_per_OUSG
i.e. the two calculations should result in the same number (adjusting for rounding).
rOUSG Price Stability via Rebasing
Rebasing is a mechanism through which the total supply of tokens is adjusted. The basic intuition is that, if we’re trying to keep the price per token at $1.00, as the value of rOUSG’s underlying assets increase in value, we need to increase the number of tokens such that the “value of assets” divided the number of tokens remains constant.
For tokens like OUSG and rOUSG, the redemption value of the rOUSG token can be calculated by dividing the Net Asset Value (NAV) of the rOUSG share class by the number of rOUSG tokens
NAV_per_rOUSG = NetAssetValue_rOUSG / Num_rOUSG_Tokens
From above, recall that NetAssetValue_rOUSG = Num_Wrapped_OUSG_Tokens * NAV_per_OUSG , so we have
NAV_per_rOUSG = (Num_Wrapped_OUSG_Tokens * NAV_per_OUSG) / Num_rOUSG_Tokens
Therefore, as NAV_per_OUSG increases as the interest accumulates, therefore, NAV_per_rOUSG would also increase…unless we also increased Num_rOUSG_Tokens. Since we want to keep NAV_per_rOUSG at $1.00, this means that we must increase Num_rOUSG_Tokens to keep the price at $1.00.
For more technical details on how rebasing, you can read more here.
For more detailed information about OUSG, please refer to the rest of these support docs, the fund’s legal docs, or reach out to us at support@ondo.finance