Ondo Finance brings tokenised US equities inside regulatory perimeter

Ondo Finance has launched what it describes as the first live deployment of third-party custodial tokenised US securities operating entirely within the existing American regulatory framework, with financial-infrastructure giant Broadridge Financial Solutions providing on-chain proxy voting and shareholder governance. The move brings BlackRock's iShares Core S&P 500 ETF (IVV) and Micron (MU) shares onto the Ethereum blockchain, minted 1:1 against underlying securities that remain inside the conventional US regulated custody chain.

The structure tracks directly the model described by the US Securities and Exchange Commission in its January 2026 statement on tokenised securities, in which a registered transfer agent mints tokens against custodied shares without those shares leaving traditional infrastructure. Ondo's SEC-registered transfer agent, Oasis Pro TA, issues the tokenised entitlements; the tokens are held by regulated custodians; and transfer restrictions are enforced by the participating broker-dealer and transfer agent. Token holders receive the same rights as holders of conventional brokerage-account shares, including issuer communications and the ability to vote through Broadridge's ProxyVote.com platform.

Regulatory perimeter as a commercial moat

Until this launch, tokenised securities in the US largely either operated offshore or required individual issuer sponsorship on a security-by-security basis. Ondo's model sidesteps both constraints. Ondo's CEO Ian De Bode framed the milestone in deliberately broad terms: "Today's milestone shows we can tokenize securities in ways that meet both market and regulatory requirements, for U.S. and global investors and provides a strong foundation for our expanding access to on-chain investments for more U.S. investors."

The company already operates a global markets platform supporting more than $1 billion in tokenised securities across 430-plus tokenised stocks and ETFs outside the US. The domestic launch extends that footprint into the world's deepest equity market, and does so under a regulatory blueprint that the SEC itself has already articulated. That alignment matters: the single biggest friction point for institutional capital allocators considering tokenised securities has been regulatory ambiguity, not technological readiness. By anchoring its model to an explicit SEC framework, Ondo is positioning the compliance stack as a barrier to entry rather than a cost centre.

Broadridge's participation is equally strategic. The firm's distributed-ledger repo platform is already the largest institutional venue for settling tokenised real assets globally, and its proxy-voting infrastructure underpins governance for a significant share of US equity holdings. Doug DeSchutter, President of Broadridge's Investor Communication Solutions business, was direct on the rationale: "Tokenization will only scale when it delivers both innovation and investor confidence."

Cross-sector capital implications

The convergence angle here extends well beyond fintech plumbing. For macro investors and cross-sector capital allocators, custodial tokenisation of mainstream US equities represents a structural shift in how on-chain and off-chain capital pools can interact. If major index ETFs and blue-chip stocks are tokenised within the regulatory perimeter, they become programmable collateral: composable into on-chain lending protocols, deployable in smart-contract-governed portfolio strategies, and accessible to global investors who currently face friction accessing US brokerage infrastructure.

That last point carries geopolitical weight. A significant share of global retail and institutional capital sits outside the US brokerage system, particularly across the GCC, Southeast Asia, and parts of Latin America. Tokenised US equities, governed by the same proxy-voting and disclosure regime as conventional shares, could open the deepest equity market in the world to a wider investor base without requiring those investors to navigate US broker-dealer onboarding.

For sovereign wealth funds and family offices allocating across asset classes, this also signals a maturing of the tokenised-asset market toward infrastructure that can withstand regulatory scrutiny. The question that remains open is whether other major issuers and ETF providers follow BlackRock and Micron onto Ondo's platform, and whether the SEC's January framework hardens into formal rulemaking that could either accelerate or constrain third-party models at scale.