Ondo Finance was founded by Nathan Allman in 2021, after he left Goldman Sachs' digital assets team (within its Global Markets division); before that, he worked in alternative credit at Prospect Capital Management and ran his own quantitative crypto hedge fund, ChainStreet Capital. A Brown University graduate, Allman's goal was to bring traditional institutional financial products — primarily US Treasuries — onto the blockchain.
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An initial $4 million seed round was led by Pantera Capital, with participation from Genesis, Digital Currency Group, and CMS Holdings.
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The name “Ondo” was deliberately chosen to evoke “structured harmony and flow,” reflecting the goal of orderly capital transitions between traditional finance and crypto.
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Its first product was “Ondo Vaults”: a structured finance protocol with fixed and variable yield tranches.
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June 2022: a token generation event (TGE) on CoinList, priced at $0.03, with a 12-month lockup followed by an 18-month gradual release.
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Early 2023: the first tokenized US Treasury products launch on Ethereum — positioning Ondo at the forefront of the fast-growing real-world-asset (RWA) tokenization sector.