Ondo and LayerZero Launch Cross-Chain Bridge for Tokenized Securities
Wall Street meets Web3—and the handshake just got a whole lot smoother. Ondo Finance and LayerZero have flipped the switch on a new cross-chain bridge designed specifically for tokenized securities, aiming to dissolve the liquidity silos that have long plagued the real-world asset (RWA) space.
The Seamless Asset Shift
This isn't just another generic bridge. The partnership targets a critical friction point: moving tokenized treasury bills, bonds, and other regulated instruments between blockchains. Traditional finance assets live by different rules—compliance, ownership tracking, regulatory nods—making their on-chain movement notoriously clunky. Ondo and LayerZero's solution builds those guardrails directly into the transfer protocol.
Why This Bridge Cuts Through the Noise
Forget slow, expensive, and opaque legacy systems. This infrastructure promises near-instant settlement across ecosystems, slashing costs and complexity for institutional players. It bypasses the need to burn and re-mint assets on a destination chain, a process that often trips over securities laws. Instead, it uses LayerZero's omnichain messaging to verify ownership and state, keeping the asset's legal wrapper intact while it hops chains.
A Liquidity Unlock for Tokenized RWAs
The endgame is clear: pooled liquidity. Imagine Ondo's flagship U.S. Treasury-backed product, OUSG, flowing freely between Ethereum, Solana, and beyond. It turns isolated pools into one interconnected market, giving DeFi protocols deeper collateral options and investors more avenues to exit or reallocate. It's the infrastructure play that could finally make tokenized Treasuries as fluid as memecoins—just with, you know, actual yield backing them.
The finance jab? It's the ultimate irony: building a decentralized future requires bulletproof bridges to the very centralized, regulated assets Wall Street has traded for decades. The bridge is live. Now we see if the traditional money has the nerve to actually walk across it.
DeFi ecosystem integration
With the bridge being built on LayerZero, applications and wallets that already support LayerZero can integrate Ondo’s tokenized stocks and ETFs with relatively little extra work.
LayerZero said more than 2,600 applications are currently connected to its infrastructure across Ethereum and BNB Chain. Following the launch, Stargate, a cross-chain liquidity protocol, has already added support for ONDO assets.
Ondo Global Markets, which issues the tokenized securities, launched on Ethereum in September and expanded to BNB Chain in October.
Ondo Finance’s President Ian De Bode said the new bridge makes it easy to move 100+ tokenized stocks and ETFs across Ethereum and BNB Chain. It helps users tap into DeFi and brings digital assets the speed, transparency, and flexibility of the modern internet.
“Tokenized assets are quickly becoming the better version of everything that already exists in traditional markets: more transparent, more programmable, and able to move with the speed and finality of the internet,” said LayerZero Labs Co-Founder and CEO Bryan Pellegrino.
Since its launch, the platform has grown to more than $350 million in total value locked and over $2 billion in cumulative trading volume. Ondo has positioned its products as compliant, institution-focused on-chain representations of traditional financial assets.
What’s next for Ondo
Ondo has recently been expanding its tokenized finance products. The company announced in December a partnership with State Street Investment Management and Galaxy Asset Management to introduce the State Street Galaxy Onchain Liquidity Sweep Fund (SWEEP), a private tokenized liquidity fund.
The fund is expected to be launched on the solana network in 2026 and will be founded upon Ondo’s U.S. Treasury-backed OUSG product, the main investor of the fund, ensuring a constant flow of liquidity.
The company also confirmed its plans to extend its real-world assets platform to the Solana blockchain network, which would be its initial effort to explore a network outside EVM.
The company, which manages $2 billion in tokenized assets such as stocks, ETFs, bonds, and Treasury-backed instruments, will introduce its infrastructure to the Solana platform in early 2026 to target institutional customers as well as qualified foreign customers.
These updates come on the heels of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s earlier this month closing a two-year investigation into Ondo without taking any enforcement actions, which is a major source of uncertainty removed as the company continues to expand the scope of its tokenized assets.
