Bankless · Thursday, July 2, 2026
Ondo Finance is developing its OndoPerps platform to improve capital efficiency in the perpetual swaps market by allowing tokenized stocks as collateral. Ian DeBode explained that traditional perp platforms are capital inefficient because market makers often need to hedge off-chain, requiring them to lock up more stablecoins. By enabling tokenized stocks as collateral, OndoPerps aims for nearly 100% capital efficiency, attracting more market makers and enhancing liquidity.
“But the problem with the perp market right now is that it's a pretty capital inefficient product. What I mean by that is, particularly for real world assets, what ends up happening is, let's say someone wants to go long Tesla, right? So an investor comes in, they deposit stable coins, they go 10X long Tesla. For every long on these perp platforms, there's a short, right? So a market maker comes in, they deposit stable coins, they short Tesla. No market maker actually wants to be short. It's not what a market maker does. Market makers always wants to be hedged. So they have a brokerage account off-chain where they buy the Tesla stock. A brokerage account is funded with whatever else they want. They buy the Tesla stock to offset the short on the per. Now they're hedged. But they're not hedged in the eyes of the per platform because the collateral is all off-chain. So they need to have more stable coins available to top up their position in case the market moves against them. So you end up with a system that is just not very capital efficient. At best, probably 50%, right? Bunch of stables here, Tesla stock there, more stables here. So the reason why that matters is because it ends up hurting the end liquidity that market makers are willing to put on chain because their cost of capital is very, very high.”
“Right, because they have to lock up dollars on one side and on another side. Correct. That is why when you typically look at the liquidity, particularly on single-name equity perks, it's just not very good. In an ideal world, what ends up happening is user comes in, they go 10x long Tesla, market maker comes in, they short Tesla, they deposit, tokenize Tesla as collateral on the per platform itself. Now they're fully hedged and they can just collect the funding. Right. Capital efficiency, more or less 100%. And that really enhances the liquidity that any single market maker is willing to put on the platform because it is so much more capital efficient. And when you get more liquidity, you get more traders, the flywheel becomes real. And that's when really the market gets into escape philosophy.”