Bankless · Thursday, July 2, 2026
Ondo Finance's system for tokenized stock trading involves an on-chain and off-chain bid process. Investors use stablecoins in their wallets to initiate a buy order, triggering an RFQ (Request for Quote) to market makers. These market makers then compete to fill the order, with the best price execution winning. The entire minting and transfer process to the investor takes about a second on chains like Solana or Binance Smart Chain, and up to 12 seconds on Ethereum.
“Yeah, there's an on-chain bid and there's an off-chain bid. So on-chain, you have essentially the platform where the end investor is and the wallet that they hold. This could be MetaMask wallet, Phantom wallet, a Binance wallet, you name it, whatever, right? Some wallets have integrated an actual stock trading interface natively in the wallet. Some have not. And then you can go to a Uniswap or a CowSwap or one-inch interface. or Jupiter on Solana, right? It kind of depends. You select a stock that you want to buy. And typically most people buy it via stable coins. You need to have stable coins in your wallet. You see a price that you like. That price is being streamed, typically fetched via our own APIs. It has a little bit of slippage tolerance, just like you would buy any crypto. The moment you see a price that you like, you say, yes, I'd like to buy.”
“At that point, an RFQ is kicked off. So there are no DEX pools on our tokens, right? I mean, people can deploy them, but we definitely do not deploy them. The token that someone wants to buy typically is not on chain yet. The moment they click that button that says buy. What ends up happening is an RFQ is kicked off. That just means that market makers who are integrated into those DeFi and tech protocols, they get a ping that says, hey, we have an inbound for whatever. Someone wants to buy $100,000 worth of SpaceX, right?”
“This entire process can take about a second. It's pretty quick. The moment we minted the tokens for SpaceX, that's when we have to collateralize. We have to actually go out and buy the underlying SpaceX stock to make sure that whatever we minted is fully backed. So within a couple hundred milliseconds that we have minted the token and it is finalized, that is when we buy the SpaceX on the open market.”