How Ondo Is Bringing Stocks and Perps Onchain | Ian De Bode

**David** (0:03)
Bankless Nation, I'm here once again with Ian De Bode from Ondo. Ian, welcome back to the podcast.

**Ian De Bode** (0:08)
Thanks for having me.

**David** (0:09)
Ian, Real World Assets, pretty hot right now.
Ondo's been here building in Real World Assets for forever. It kind of feels like the rest of the crypto world is moving into your guys' domain. How does it feel to just have already been in the space that now a lot of other companies are moving into?

**Ian De Bode** (0:28)
Yeah, it's definitely a surreal experience to see what you were saying almost three years ago now all come to life.
So it's very nice. It's in a way flattering. There's definitely increased competition. I feel like every single week, there is a large crypto exchange or brokerage platform launching their own version of tokenized equities. But it is very interesting and exciting to see everyone entering the space and really embracing our debut.

**David** (0:55)
Yeah, especially with the rise of Perps.
Really, the rise of Perps in the first half of this year coincided with the rise of just like real world asset trading. It's like crypto volumes on crypto exchanges and also on Perps is down. But real world asset trading is up.

**Ian De Bode** (1:13)
Yes.

**David** (1:14)
Turns out people like real world assets. I want to talk about the one particular real world asset that has caught everyone's attention this week. It's SpaceX and Tokenize SpaceX. SpaceX IPO on NASDAQ on June 12th.
Ondo's Tokenize SpaceX stock was minted on Ethereum that same day, also on June 12th.
How did that happen so fast?

**Ian De Bode** (1:34)
Yeah, great question. I think we were alive with trading about five minutes after the real thing started trading. So clearly this was not our first rodeo. We've done an IPO before. That one went smooth, but not as smooth as this one. So we kind of knew what to do. You deploy the token ahead of time. You really make sure that all the market makers, et cetera, already have it integrated into their systems.
Our tokenized stock platform works best with intense based systems. Think of your One Inch Fusion, Uniswap X, CowSwap, all those guys. We made sure that ahead of time, all of those platforms had already integrated the token.
And then the moment the thing becomes tradable, we just had to flip the switch in our system, get a price feed, essentially, to make sure that we understand what the price is, and the moment that happens, anyone can buy it. So that basically only took about five minutes, which is why everyone more or less at IPO was able to buy SpaceX. And those who did, quite frankly, I think are up 30% or so.

**David** (2:34)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or even if they were down 30%, you don't care because all you're doing is serving them the stock, right?

**Ian De Bode** (2:42)
That is correct. We are a big proponent of investor choice. It does make me happier when our investors are up versus down. But yes, in the end, it is all about enabling access. And people are free to do with their money what they choose.

**David** (2:55)
This might require just kind of a refresher on what Ondo tokenized stock is and how it works. But did you guys have SpaceX shares ahead of IPO? Or how were you guys ready to flip the switch and have those tokens trade on Ethereum actually being backed by SpaceX? How did that, how does that work?

**Ian De Bode** (3:16)
Yeah, we did not do the pre-IPO allocation this time. The problem with those pre-IPO allocations is that you are entirely dependent on getting an allocation in the IPO.
And that really gets handed out to large institutions, big brokerage platforms. You know, Ondo is big, but not that big, right? And I think if the risk of trying to promise pre-IPO allocation to some of the partners is that you end up not getting it, and people are very disappointed, and that is exactly what we saw, particularly with X-Stalks, quite frankly, who I think did not set expectations in the right way. So you had ByBid and BigGit and Binance Wallet, et cetera, all being quite disappointed because they did not get any of the allocation by X-Stalks that they wanted. So with that in mind, we did not actually try that in the first place, but down the line, there are ways to do pre-IPO stocks. I mean, there's a lot of excitement around OpenAI, Anthropic, a couple of others.
We are definitely considering offering pre-IPO stocks as well. But right now, our main focus is always the moment the IPO happens, the moment something is tradable on the NASDAQ or the New York Stock Exchange, that is when we can tokenize something very quickly with our model, with the wrapper form, so available to offshore US, offshore investors outside the US, so that the moment something trades on one of the national exchanges in the US, people can buy it in wrapped form via our platform and via our DeFi integrations.