Tokenized stocks are gaining ground fast — and Ian de Bode, president at Ondo Finance ONDO$0.2991, believes they’re becoming one of the most practical and scalable use cases for crypto.

The firm said its tokenized equity platform, dubbed Ondo Global Markets, has raked in over $500 million in total value locked and recorded over $7 billion in volume since its launch in September 2025, It's now the largest by size among providers, leading ahead of issuers Kraken's xStocks and Robinhood, RWA.xyz data shows. The overall market of stock tokens is just shy of $1 billion, growing 27% over the past month alone.

Before that, Ondo started with tokenized U.S. Treasuries, and is now the leading issuer with over $2 billion of assets altogether.

While tokenization attempts increasingly include alternative assets like real estate or private credit, Ondo is now laser-focused on stocks and ETFs with strong price discovery, deep liquidity and clear valuation, de Bode said in an interview with CoinDesk. De Bode will speak at CoinDesk's Consensus Miami this May.

"You tokenize something either to make it easier to access or to use it as collateral," de Bode said. "Stocks fit both, and they price like assets people actually understand — unlike a building in Manhattan."

Ondo issues tokenized notes backed by stocks held via clearing brokers. These tokens move freely across wallets like stablecoins, with users only required to KYC at the minting stage. That structure allows the assets to trade on decentralized finance (DeFi) venues, where other tokenized stock models often struggle due to transfer restrictions or illiquid pools.

A major advantage, de Bode argued, is instant minting and burning, which allows large investors to trade millions of dollars in tokenized equities at prices mirroring their brokerage account, without premiums or slippage. One investor, he said, minted $17 million worth of Google stock tokens.

That mechanism has attracted users in Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America, as well as crypto-native investors who want to toggle between cryptocurrencies like bitcoin BTC$82,582.84 and Google shares without ever leaving their wallet.

But liquidity still thins out on weekends, de Bode said. Crypto markets and decentralized finance (DeFi) run around the clock — 24/7 — while traditional finance (TradFi) runs Monday to Friday. That mismatch makes hedging difficult for market makers for stock tokens.

That could change if NYSE and Nasdaq follow through on their plans to support 24/7 tokenized stock trading, effectively syncing TradFi and DeFi clocks, de Bode said.

"If TradFi moves to 24/7, that’s a godsend," he said. "It’s our biggest bottleneck."

Ondo’s focus for this year is to expand its global markets platform — adding hundreds more assets, integrating with new blockchains and powering crypto exchanges looking to compete with retail brokers.

"Our goal isn’t to compete with exchanges," de Bode said. "We power them. Think of us as the Tether for stocks."