JD Durkin: Matthieu de Vergnes joins us now, global head of institutional at Ondo Finance. Good to see you here today. Grateful for a few minutes of your time.
Matthieu de Vergnes: Great to see you.
JD Durkin: Ondo just passed $4 billion in assets as of two days ago, and as of this week is now the world’s largest tokenization platform. How did you get there? What is driving the growth?
Matthieu de Vergnes: We got there because we really saw the need for our users globally, which is access to U.S. stocks, U.S. ETFs, and U.S. Treasuries in a seamless way. Investors across the world, if you have a wallet and an internet connection, can access U.S. stocks and U.S. Treasuries in a seamless way, as if you were in the U.S., with the same execution quality. That’s a core differentiator in many geographies where access is actually pretty [unclear: “intermediate”; likely intermediated]. Fees are higher, and market hours don’t correspond to the actual time zone you’re in. So we saw that problem, and there are a lot more problems we’re looking to solve by bringing utility into these assets and having them on chain. That will continue to turbocharge our growth and keep us rising at the pace we’ve been.
JD Durkin: You’ve had a long career in the space, even before you joined the team at Ondo Finance. How serious are big institutions about the conversation of tokenization at this point?
Matthieu de Vergnes: It’s an excellent question. We’ve really seen a pivot on the institutional front in adoption and interest in digital assets. If you look at 18 months ago, before that, it was more, I’d say, an innovation strategy team, a theoretical concept of, should we be on chain? If you look at it today, it’s really driven by the businesses. I like to think about it this way. You’ve got the buy side, where it’s about creating new products and new distribution. For the sell side, it’s, how do we better serve our buy side? And for the plumbing and the infrastructure, it’s, what’s the next wave of infrastructure? All these different parties are really jumping in and engaging with us, and we’re partnering with the leaders in all these spaces.
JD Durkin: That’s amazing. Correct me if I’m wrong, tokenized stocks are now one of your fastest growing, most successful products. Who’s out there buying them, and why are they buying them? What is that real-time feedback looking like?
Matthieu de Vergnes: It’s a lot of investors, if you’re in Asia, in Southeast Asia, in the Middle East and Africa, in Latin America. I think the stablecoin story was access to the U.S. dollar. Now it’s, I don’t want to just sit on the U.S. dollar, I want to be able to invest that dollar. I want to be able to take advantage of opportunities, like maybe at the end of the day yesterday, opportunities that come up. The best way to do that is to have not just a stablecoin in your wallet, but a way to then convert that stablecoin 24/7 into a stock, an ETF, or a portfolio. We launched portfolios with BlackRock that allow you to get that exposure instantly. So that’s really the core segment that we’ve grown with and that we’ll continue to address. The other is that you’ve got a lot of institutional demand now. If you put these stocks on chain, if you put these ETFs on chain, I can start doing things with them that are really net new, that I can’t do on traditional rails. So you’re starting to see that institutional adoption on chain with perpetual futures, with portfolios, and other products.
JD Durkin: We have a lot of high-profile IPOs here in 2026, and specifically a lot of interest in the pre-IPO action. Private markets allow investors to trade exposure to exactly that. How does that work, and what are any underlying risks investors should know?
Matthieu de Vergnes: The concept is the same: accessibility. Private markets are probably even harder to access than public markets. So how do you give investors the ability to invest in companies like, obviously, Anthropic, which is coming up, or OpenAI, or other companies like that, which are of that size and provide a different exposure to investors but are not available on markets or exchanges? The way we do it is we issue notes that represent an exposure and are referencing some of these assets, and investors can buy and trade these. The benefit is you have venues that are 24/7 and allow secondary markets on those, whereas typically in a private market you’re locked in and it’s very difficult to get liquidity. It’s available outside the U.S., so this is a real play for investors outside the U.S. who want exposure to the U.S. It’s an opportunity to expand the asset classes to which you get exposure.
JD Durkin: Matthieu de Vergnes, global head of institutional at Ondo Finance. We covered a lot of ground there in a few minutes. A total pro. Come back and see us anytime.
Matthieu de Vergnes: Thank you, JD. Enjoy your weekend.
