ONDO Token Reaches Over $1B Market Cap in One Day

Ondo Finance, the third-largest real-world asset project with nearly $200M of tokenized securities, issued new tokens today.

Ondo unlocked 14.3% of its native ONDO tokens, with the token's market capitalization soaring to $1.66B, according to DEX Screener.

Exchanges including like ByBit, Gate.io, and KuCoin have listed ONDO — Coinbase also added the token to its list of assets it plans to offer on the exchange in the future.

ONDO token holders will govern parameters like adding and removing collateral on Flux Finance, a lending platform developed by the team, according to a post from the project on X.

Flux allows users to permissionlessly lend stablecoins to qualified purchasers who then borrow against Ondo’s tokenized treasuries.

Degens and Institutions

ONDO’s launch represents another step forward in the eponymous company’s balancing act to cater to both crypto users and large institutions.

Ondo offers products which are restricted only to qualified purchasers, a legal designation typically conferred to parties worth over $5M, while also enabling a permissionless protocol available to DeFi users.

The token, which governs the Ondo DAO, adds another crypto-native wrinkle to the project’s ecosystem.

Major Player

Ondo’s tokenized products are worth over $200M, according to a post from the company. OUSG, Ondo’s most valuable product, has a market capitalization of $108.9M and is the third-largest tokenized Treasuries offering on the market, according to rwa.xyz. OUSG, represents an ETF for short-term U.S. Treasuries offered by Blackrock.

Ondo launched in January 2023 and deployed to Solana last month.

Token Details

A proposal to unlock ONDO tokens from Ondo Finance surfaced on Flux’s forum last week. Holders of the token could already vote with ONDO, but now the unlock makes them transferable, creating a market for the assets.

A raise via CoinList, a platform which facilitates token sales, was responsible for a “substantial portion” of the initial circulating supply of 1.4B tokens, according to a post from Ondo. 18,000 people participated in the sale.

Investors and team members, who are entitled to 45.9% of the tokens, are subject to 12 more months of lockup, followed by a vesting period of four years, according to that same document.

Another 52.1% of ONDO tokens are part of the “ecosystem growth” section. The proposal on Flux’s forum lists growth initiatives like airdrops as potential uses for the allocation.

To this end, the Ondo Foundation, an organization whose mandate is to grow the Ondo ecosystem, has established a points system to reward users for actions like voting in governance. Points systems have become key to allocating airdrops in the past 2023.