DeFi

Ondo Finance (ONDO): Yield-Generating Stablecoins in DeFi

Intermediate
DeFi
Explainers
Altcoins
2 Feb 2024

Decentralized finance (DeFi) has the potential to turn the real-world financial system on its head. By offering accessible finance products to everyone, blockchain technology can make it much easier for people to get the services they need. One especially promising financial system to explore is Ondo Finance. Their blockchain finance tools offer users a variety of helpful features. To learn more about Ondo Finance's potential applications, read this helpful guide.

Key Takeaways:

  • Ondo Finance is a blockchain finance system that provides users with tokenized versions of real-world assets.

  • Looking to trade ONDO tokens? Bybit now offers the ONDO/USDT Spot trading pair.

What Is Ondo Finance?

Ondo Finance is a blockchain finance system that provides users with tokenized versions of real-world assets. Through Ondo’s decentralized finance system, investors can explore U.S.–based, institutional-grade securities.

History of Ondo Finance

Ondo Finance was founded by Nathan Allman, a Stanford University graduate with a focus on economics and business. Allman worked at several traditional finance companies, including Goldman Sachs and ChainStreet Capital. During his time working with hedge funds, Allman became interested in cryptocurrency.

He realized that there was a real need for innovation in the finance industry. Despite crypto being an extremely lucrative industry, many financial institutions were still stuck in the past. Allman founded Ondo as a way of bridging the gap between traditional financial markets and web3 finance. His goal intrigued many other people, and Ondo has managed to obtain $24 million in funding from partnerships with Pantera, Wintermute and Coinbase Ventures.

What Does Ondo Finance Aim to Achieve?

Ondo Finance hopes to build the next generation of financial infrastructure by taking the standard financial system and applying it to cutting-edge blockchain technology. By combining these two concepts, Ondo Finance aims to create a more efficient and accessible market.

Not only does Ondo want to offer U.S.–based securities outside of the United States — it also plans to make products that are even easier to work with than partnering with a standard hedge fund manager. Ondo Finance also intends to implement a decentralized structure that puts users in control, ensuring that decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO) provide a transparent look at its business operations.

How Does Ondo Finance Work?

The Ondo Finance system revolves around the idea of tokenized assets. It works with exchange-traded funds managed by leading companies, such as BlackRock and Pimco, whose traditional assets represent a lot of different securities ranging from government money market funds to high-yield corporate bonds.

Ondo Finance purchases stakes in these traditional assets and then uses its own blockchain system to represent fund stakes as tokens. Each token fluctuates in value based on the value of the real-world assets it represents. Users can buy and sell these tokenized real-world assets through Ondo to trade in U.S.–based securities, without needing to actually buy exchange-traded funds through a traditional hedge manager.

Features of Ondo Finance

Ondo Finance's features are available in a few different tiers. Depending upon where you live and how much you want to pay, you can explore these various options.

General-Access Products

The general-access products of Ondo Finance are the items anyone can explore without having to get heavily involved in other Ondo Finance services like lending protocols or short-term bonds.

USDY Token

USD Yield (USDY), a tokenized real-world asset secured by the U.S. Treasury securities, appeals to stablecoin holders but also offers some additional earning potential.USDY holders earn DeFi yields of around 5% APY. In addition to the great interest rates, the USDY token also provides access to helpful investor protections that prevent the coin from losing its value. As long as you aren't in the U.S., you can purchase this coin without needing to sign up for the rest of Ondo Finance's management services.

Qualified-Access Products

Ondo Finance has some products that it only offers to qualifying users. These products are mostly available to institutional-grade investors looking for new ways of profiting from items such as short-term bonds.

OMMF Token

This tokenized real-world asset provides exposure to money market funds. OMFF is a stablecoin that’s backed by government money market funds. However, since it's tokenized, it's transferable 24/7. OMMF tokens are based on the Ethereum network. Their main purpose is to be an accessible form of collateral.

OUSG Token

TheOUSG fund is based on a short-term U.S. Treasuries ETF. This institutional-grade investment is meant to be stable and predictable, and thus appeals to stablecoin holders. Because it includes so many exchange-traded funds managed by experts, it's also designed to be highly liquid. The OUSG fund that backs the OUSG token contains shares from the iShares Short Treasury Bond ETF, along with shares of USDC and real-world USD.

Flux Finance

Flux Finance offers lending protocols for users who need extra crypto assets. This decentralized lending protocol is backed by the OUSG government bond fund and other forms of stable collateral. Users deposit USDC and other stablecoins, and then receive fStables they can use for leveraged trading or other DeFi strategies. 

Interest rates for Flux vary based on market conditions.

Ondo Token Bridge

The Ondo Token Bridge ensures that all the various tokens on Ondo Finance can easily get where they need to go. This multi-chain bridge lets users transfer their tokens between exchanges and blockchains while still maintaining security.

Ondo Token Converter

The Ondo Token Converter allows users to choose from multiple convenient methods of getting the money they earn from yield-bearing Ondo Finance tokens. It lets users deposit USDC to get USDY, and then as the yield accrues, they get more USDY tokens added to their wallet. You can also use the token converter to get tokens that increase in redemption value as you earn a yield.

Ondo Finance Road Map

Since its founding in 2021, Ondo Finance has already successfully released tokenized securities based on a U.S. Treasuries ETF and money market funds. There are also ongoing plans to add more public securities to the blockchain, such as a rebasing version of USDY, and to offer users even more tokenized access to traditional financial markets.

In addition to adding more features, such as the rebasing version of USDY, Ondo Finance hopes to further expand to create an Ondo Ecosystem that will include software development platforms, more DeFi protocols and a decentralized lending protocol.

The other major goal on the Ondo Finance road map is improved adoption. Ondo plans to start marketing its system more extensively, creating more use cases for its tokens. Ultimately, its system hopes to attract more users and turn tokenized assets into one of the leading types of web3 investing.

ONDO Tokenomics

ONDO offers many different tokens for investors to work with, but its native token, ONDO, is used primarily to vote in the Ondo DAO. A total supply of 10 billion ONDO tokens will be gradually unlocked throughout 2024.

Unlike many other tokens, ONDO doesn’t have a strict token distribution schedule. Instead, Ondo Finance plans on letting the Ondo DAO vote on different distribution schemes and be able to change distribution plans over time. Sixteen percent of all tokens were allocated to investors, while distribution of the remainder will be left up to later Ondo DAO proposals.

ONDO Price Prediction

ONDO was just released in mid-January of 2024, but its price is already climbing. As of late January 2024, the Ondo Finance token's price has been hovering between $0.20 and $0.30, with its market capitalization around $340 million. DigitalCoinPrice's data analysis predicts that ONDO will reach at least $0.56 by the end of 2024 and $1.91 by 2030, and CoinMarketCap's market sentiment tracker reports an overall bullish outlook on ONDO. Some enthusiasts posting on X (Twitter) even believe ONDO might hit $1 within the next few months.

However, other analysts have a less positive outlook. CoinEdition points out that token prices are heavily affected by investors selling off ONDO when their tokens unlock, and believes that ONDO might dip as low as $0.20 in the first quarter of 2024. As with many other new startups, there’s a chance ONDO may be overvalued and could soon face a price correction.

Where to Buy ONDO

Looking to trade ONDO tokens? Bybit now offers the ONDO/USDT Spot trading pair. To get started with trading ONDO, you’ll need to first establish a Bybit account and fund it with cryptocurrency before navigating to the ONDO/USDT Spot trading page. 

Skinny_Banner-1600x400.webp

Is ONDO A Good Investment?

By bringing tokenized securities to blockchain, Ondo Finance has become one of the most unusual DeFi projects of 2024. This has allowed it to attract a lot of attention, and Ondo token holders have already made some impressive profits. If it can attract a lot of institutional investors, ONDO's market capitalization could skyrocket, so it's no surprise that some analysts are calling ONDO one of January’s hottest tokens.

However, ONDO tokens are still quite new. Even small issues, such as an investor selling their tokens, can be enough to affect prices for quite a while, and the financial system is also vulnerable to regulatory changes. Since Ondo Finance is so closely linked to traditional finance markets, shifting laws could devalue its services and cause the price of ONDO tokens to drop. Therefore, ONDO token holders need to exercise caution and implement some loss-mitigation strategies before purchasing this crypto asset.

Closing Thoughts

The ability to trade instruments such as government bond funds or high-yield corporate bonds on blockchain has a lot of intriguing applications. Ondo Finance can potentially appeal to both institutional investors looking for DeFi yields and crypto investors seeking to branch out into traditional assets. Even if you aren't interested in tokenized securities, you can still potentially profit from Ondo Finance by trading the Ondo DAO token.

#Bybit #TheCryptoArk