Author: Deep Tide TechFlow

Playing US stocks on-chain is no longer a rarity.

Eight months ago, Ondo Finance and Ondo Foundation launched Ondo Global Markets, allowing more investors to truly hold US stocks on-chain without limitations of time, location, or cost.

According to RWA.xyz data, the current total value of tokenized stocks on-chain has exceeded $1.44 billion, representing over a 110% growth compared to the beginning of the year. Ondo Global Markets, as the first tokenized stock and ETF platform to reach a TVL of $1 billion, occupies about 70% of the market share.

Behind these numbers is the genuine enthusiasm of users for tokenized US stocks, as well as Ondo's indisputable leading position in this sector.

But this is only the first half of the "playing US stocks on-chain" story.

Ondo Global Markets allows everyone to buy US stocks like buying coins, but there is still a distance between "buying" and "using."

Having capabilities like collateral, leverage, shorting, and hedging is necessary to truly become a mature financial asset.

This is a territory that has seen continuous attempts but remains mostly blank:

For a long time, the focus of the on-chain derivatives market has almost always revolved around crypto-native assets;

Meanwhile, during the process of bringing real-world assets into on-chain contract markets, issues such as how liquidity is integrated, how capital efficiency is improved, and how to achieve more effective risk control under complex logic like leverage liquidation, will face significant challenges.

These are not problems that can be solved simply by launching a few US stock Perp trading pairs.

What the market lacks is a comprehensive underlying structure that better incorporates tokenized real-world assets into the on-chain derivatives market.

On June 9, 2026, eight months after the launch of Ondo Global Markets, the public beta of Ondo Perps, a perpetual contract trading platform focused on stocks, ETFs, and commodities, officially went live:

Eligible users can use tokenized real-world assets directly as collateral, inheriting the real liquidity of traditional markets, supporting up to 20x leverage and 24/7 trading...

From "available to buy" to "playable," the second half of the "playing US stocks on-chain" story is unfolding by Ondo Perps.

The True Face of Mount Lushan: Ondo Perps Product Unboxing

Upon entering the Ondo Perps interface, familiarity hits you.

Whether it's the K-line chart on the left or the order book on the right, this UI layout and interaction logic require almost no additional learning for users with experience in contract trading.

Let’s first see what can be traded.

The asset selection can be made in the top left corner, Ondo Perps currently supports 24/7 trading in 22 perpetual contract markets:

• US Stocks: NVDA, TSLA, AAPL, MSFT, GOOGL, AMZN, META, NFLX, AMD, INTC, ORCL, PLTR, COIN, HOOD, MSTR, CRCL
• Commodities: XAU (Gold), XAG (Silver), WTI (Crude Oil)
• Indices: US 500, US 100
• ETF: Roundhill Memory ETF (DRAM)

The selection logic is very clear, prioritizing high liquidity, high attention, and targets with clear demand from global investors.

After selecting a market, information about the current price, 24-hour changes, 24-hour trading volume, financing rates, etc., is presented at the top.

Taking NVDA as an example, the current transaction price on Ondo Perps is 207.79, with a Mark Price of 207.77, which shows a very small spread.

Next, let’s see how to trade.

Shifting our focus to the order area in the top right corner, we can first see the Long (Bullish) and Short (Bearish) buttons, indicating that users can establish directional positions around US stocks, indices, and commodities, currently supporting up to 20x leverage.

For order types, Ondo Perps currently offers market orders, limit orders, and TWAP as three options.

Market orders execute at the current market's best price, while limit orders execute at the user-defined desired price; both serve relatively basic functions. For users who have already established positions, Ondo Perps also supports take profit and stop loss; when the mark price reaches the user's preset level, the system can automatically trigger liquidation to manage profit targets and downside risks.

Of particular interest is the TWAP order: it splits a large order into multiple smaller orders and executes them in batches within a preset time window to reduce the impact of a single large trade on market prices. Ondo Perps’ TWAP further refines execution parameters: supporting execution cycles of up to 7 days, each sub-order has a maximum slippage protection of 3bps, and each account can run up to 20 active TWAP orders simultaneously.

In traditional financial markets, TWAP orders are a common method for institutional traders to manage large positions, and by supporting TWAP, the audience for Ondo Perps has expanded further from ordinary traders to institution-level professional traders with higher requirements for refined execution.

Meanwhile, trading costs are also a point of concern.

In terms of fees, Ondo Perps Maker rate is 1.5 bps (0.015%), and Taker rate is 3.5 bps (0.035%), which is relatively low compared to other contract platforms, making it relatively friendly to high-frequency traders and institutional users.

After submitting an order, users can view the current positions, unrealized profits and losses, margin usage, financing rates, liquidation prices, and other information in the position panel.

It should be noted that Ondo Perps is provided by Ondo Global Panama Inc. and utilizes technology developed by Ondo Finance Inc. This service is not available in the United States, Panama, and other jurisdictions where trading is prohibited.

By simply browsing the product page, we can see that Ondo Perps has initially constructed the basic framework for trading perpetual contracts in stocks, indices, and commodities.

However, in contract platforms, what is always compared is capital efficiency and liquidity.

At this point, you might find that the advantage of Ondo Perps lies not in individuals but in cooperation.

As a leader in RWA, Ondo chose to launch Ondo Perps eight months after the introduction of Ondo Global Markets, its market foresight, functional innovation, and product delivery capabilities may be stronger than we imagined.

As early as eight months ago, Ondo had already laid the groundwork for the launch of Ondo Perps.

Tokenized Stocks as Margin, How Ondo Perps Achieves High Capital Efficiency?

Compared to just bluntly putting popular assets like NVDA, TSLA, US500, gold, and crude oil directly into the Perps market, Ondo Perps seeks to fundamentally change the role of these assets in the on-chain financial system.

The underlying design of Ondo Perps revolves around this core.

Collateral Reconstruction: Tokenized Stocks from "Exposure" to "Asset"

When users make their first deposit on Ondo Perps, they will immediately discover:

In addition to USDC, Ondo Perps also supports Pre-alpha users to use tokenized stocks from Ondo Global Markets as collateral. Although currently only SPYon and QQQon are supported as collateral, and it is open only to eligible users, the official announcement states that more users will soon have access.

This is the key difference that sets Ondo Perps apart from other perpetual contract platforms.

Reconstructing the collateral logic can be seen as a necessary step for Ondo.

For a long time, the on-chain derivatives market has heavily relied on stablecoins as margin; users must first convert their tokenized stocks into stablecoins to participate in derivative trading. This not only lowers efficiency but also creates isolated states for different assets, lacking direct connections.

Ondo Perps supporting tokenized stocks directly as collateral is key to the transition of tokenized stocks from "on-chain" to "usable," elevating capital efficiency and completing the upgrade from "simple holding" to "efficient participation in derivatives markets": the spot is still there, exposure remains, while also serving as margin to support a long or short position.

This further breaks asset boundaries; assets like stablecoins, stocks, and gold which previously belonged to different systems can interact within the same account in Ondo Perps, also giving rise to more innovative strategies and products.

Cross-Asset Margin: Maximizing Capital Efficiency

Most DeFi derivatives platforms calculate margin in isolation, meaning each position independently occupies a portion of capital, resulting in a very limited capital utilization rate.

Cross-asset composite margin is another core of Ondo Perps: all assets within an account are unified as a single margin pool, including USDC and tokenized stocks, with the system calculating risk and available margin based on the overall asset portfolio.

We can find this model in traditional financial markets, specifically in the Prime Brokerage system: Wall Street doesn’t allocate capital for each transaction individually; instead, they hand over the entire balance sheet to a prime broker for unified management, with the system dynamically allocating margins based on portfolio risk, achieving far greater capital efficiency than individual retail strategies.

This model yields immediate improvements in capital efficiency: the same asset supports larger positions; or the same position occupies less margin, freeing up more capital for other uses.

Liquidity Advantages: Inheriting Traditional Markets

Due to limitations in on-chain scale, assets like stocks, indices, and commodities face ongoing challenges to acquire sufficient liquidity on-chain.

In previous attempts, most platforms tried to inject capital into liquidity on-chain, but in the face of traditional financial market's scale, this proved insufficient, often resulting in low liquidity, high slippage, and high spreads.

Based on past lessons, Ondo Perps chose a reverse approach, inheriting traditional market liquidity.

Returning to the issuance layer, Ondo Global Market adopts an "instant atomic minting and burning" model: only when users have demands does the platform purchase real stocks and mint tokens; when users wish to sell, tokens are immediately burned and real stocks are sold. This allows Ondo Global Market to directly connect with the trillion-dollar traditional financial market.

Ondo Perps supports Ondo Global Market's tokenized stocks as collateral, further creating a positive liquidity-attracting cycle: due to higher capital efficiency, it attracts market makers and institutional users more strongly, thus promoting overall liquidity growth on the platform.

High-Performance Execution: Balancing Speed and Fairness

"Ondo Perps is a decentralized off-chain exchange."

A statement in the official documentation directly points to the two core trade-offs of contract trading:

• On-chain perpetual contract platform: transparent but delayed, unable to support high-frequency contract trading
• Centralized perpetual contract exchanges: efficient but opaque, with risks of front-running and lack of verifiable trust.

How to have both fish and bear's paw? Ondo Perps solves this with a trusted execution environment (TEE) based on Intel SGX.

TEE is essentially a hardware-level encrypted isolation area within the CPU chip, called an enclave, where the code and data running inside the enclave, including Ondo itself, cannot be accessed or modified without approval from an independent network of verifiers.

Ondo Perps places core operations such as order matching, margin calculation, and liquidation trigger within the enclave: on one side, off-chain execution achieves speeds comparable to CEX; on the other side, since access is not possible after entering the enclave, transaction history is disclosed only after orders have been fully processed, ensuring that no one can "manipulate behind the scenes."

Meanwhile, user deposits are not stored in the enclave, with each user having a permanent on-chain address linked to their assets: when users wish to use these assets on the platform, they transfer them to the platform’s wallet; when they no longer wish to use these assets, they can request a withdrawal, and the assets will return to the user’s wallet. All transfers are transparently on-chain, similar to a self-custodied blockchain wallet, and no one other than the user can control their assets.

Of course, while TEE ensures execution, who oversees the management of TEE?

For this, Ondo Perps introduces a decentralized network of verifiers, responsible for verifying whether there are unauthorized code changes within the enclave, while any modifications to TEE must be approved by a majority of independent verifiers.

Risk Control Mechanism: Multiple "Brakes" in Extreme Cases

After understanding the question of "how fast funds transfer," the risk control mechanism focuses on whether the system can withstand "in extreme cases."

Real-world assets + full collateral margins, the risks faced by Ondo Perps are more complex than ordinary Perps.

The first line of defense in risk control is to avoid triggering liquidation as much as possible.

Ondo Perps monitors margins in real-time and provides robust data support for users to assess account safety, while continuously adjusting the financing rate to manage the long-short ratio; if the contract price deviates from the mark price, the rate mechanism incentivizes traders to pull prices back to a reasonable range.

Additionally, Ondo Perps uses external oracles to aggregate prices as the mark price, making the cost of price manipulation extremely high, further ensuring that platform prices are sufficiently credible, with tokenized stocks as collateral receiving some discount to retain extra safety buffers for the system.

Once the groundwork is in place, if liquidation becomes unavoidable, Ondo Perps follows a five-layer liquidation process:

• Order Withdrawal: Cancel all pending orders and release all margin
• Standard Liquidation: Execute limit IOC orders at bankruptcy prices for closing positions
• Third-Party Liquidation: External third-party liquidators take over positions at market prices
• Insurance Fund Backstop: Cover the difference to avoid systemic chain reactions (the fund for the insurance foundation comes from a 1.5% fee collected from forced liquidations).
• ADL Automatic Position Reduction: Automatically reduce positions from some profitable counterparties to maintain overall system stability.

The five brakes progress layer by layer to reduce account risks.

We can clearly feel the differences between Ondo Perps, traditional financial contract platforms, and crypto contract platforms through a table.

From Issuance to Contracts, Ondo's Key Two-Step to "Full-Stack On-Chain Capital Markets"

Looking across the entire tokenized stock sector, Ondo Perps is undoubtedly a unique presence.

Tokenized stocks being able to enter the contract market as margin is the core innovation of Ondo Perps.

In this high capital efficiency, high liquidity contract trading system, the asset issuance layer and the derivatives trading layer must be interconnected: the issuance layer determines the minting and redemption logic of the stocks, while the derivatives layer determines the margin calculation and liquidation rules; both are tightly linked, enabling the system to truly understand "how much this stock is worth and under what conditions liquidation will be triggered."

And with both Ondo Global Market and Ondo Perps products, Ondo is the only player that possesses both "issuance layer" and "derivatives layer." In other words, Ondo is the only one with the conditions to achieve this.

More importantly, these two layers do not simply stack statically but structurally reinforce each other.

The larger the scale of Global Markets and the more users holding tokenized stocks on-chain, the larger the potential user base and collateral scale for Ondo Perps. Currently, Ondo Global Markets has already accumulated over $1 billion in TVL and tens of thousands of users.

Conversely, as trading on Ondo Perps becomes more active, the use cases for tokenized stocks become stronger, thereby driving the minting volumes and holding demands of Ondo Global Markets.

Although Ondo Perps is still in its early stages, under the model of multi-asset and cross-market, its liquidity and performance in terms of liquidation and risk management in reality are yet to be observed. However, when the asset layer and trading layer grow together—once the positive flywheel between Ondo Global Markets and Ondo Perps starts to turn, it will create barriers that other competitors find difficult to replicate in a short period.

In addition, Ondo's long-term accumulation in the RWA sector, including product experience from Ondo Global Markets and Ondo's resources in market-making and institutional trust, will naturally migrate to Ondo Perps, becoming a force that cannot be underestimated in the long-term competition of Ondo Perps.

Back at the Ondo Summit in February 2026, the Ondo team introduced Ondo Perps for the first time, calling it an important step for Ondo to expand from RWA tokenization to a "full-stack on-chain capital market."

Ondo Global Markets addresses the "on-chain" issue, allowing global investors to hold real US stock assets on-chain without limitations of time, location, or cost;

Ondo Perps resolves the "usable" issue, allowing these already on-chain assets to truly enter the financial system, being able to be collateralized, leveraged, shorted, and hedged.

From "on-chain" to "usable," the key two-step approach under full-stack thinking is clearly visible.

As for where Ondo will place its next moves in the expansion of the "full-stack on-chain capital market"?

The easiest guess is regarding the "expansion" of Ondo Perps:

Currently, Ondo Perps supports 22 perpetual contract markets with 3 major assets as collateral, whereas Ondo Global Markets has already supported over 260+ tokenized stocks and ETFs. This numerical gap itself serves as a roadmap. To promote further prosperity in the market, Ondo Perps will push for the expansion of more trading targets and support for additional collateral in the future.

Additionally, currently, tokenized stocks as collateral are only open to whitelisted users. As this feature gradually opens, professional traders, market makers, and institutions will successively enter the market, and this influx of users will directly drive an increase in liquidity depth and trading volume.

However, as Ondo Perps becomes the first perpetual contract trading platform to use tokenized stocks as margin, once it grants tokenized stocks truly complete financial attributes, the imagination surrounding derivatives will go far beyond this.

With perpetual contracts as the starting point, are more options, structured products, and cross-asset composite strategy plays on the horizon for Ondo?

The second half of the "playing US stocks on-chain" story may indeed be far more exciting than the first half.