Pantera Managing Partner: The RWA track is experiencing a gold rush

The Ondo Summit, held in New York City on February 6, 2025, marks an important milestone in the integration of traditional finance and blockchain technology. The event features a star-studded lineup of guests, including but not limited to:

Asset Manager:

• Goldman Sachs

• Franklin Templeton

• BlackRock

• Fidelity Investments

• Bank of New York Mellon

Blockchain and DeFi Leaders:

• David Schwartz (Ripple CTO)

• Sergey Nazarov (Chainlink Co-Founder)

• Mary-Catherine Lader (COO of Uniswap)

• Konstantin Richter (CEO, Blockdaemon)

Regulatory officials:

• Caroline D. Pham (Acting Chairperson, Commodity Futures Trading Commission)

• Summer K. Mersinger (Commissioner, Commodity Futures Trading Commission)

• J. Christopher Giancarlo (Former Chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission)

Industry Experts:

• Dan Morehead (Founder of Pantera Capital)

• Mike Novogratz (CEO, Galaxy Digital)

• Patrick McHenry (Former Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee)

This is perhaps the first time that blockchain leaders, regulators and traditional asset managers have come together to discuss the steps needed to integrate blockchain technology with traditional finance (rather than meta-programming).

This has been a long time coming.

What excited me most was the pragmatism in the conversation. Some of the comments from Sandy Kaul of Franklin Templeton captured this thoughtfulness:

“Don’t underestimate how hard it is to move from an account-based system to a wallet-based system… There is no real portfolio; a portfolio is a virtual construct of different accounts, so the idea that I can mix assets and have interoperable assets is completely foreign to anyone coming from a traditional background.”

“The system that [regulators] came up with [in the 1970s] started to have central counterparties [and] central depositories. We started to have clearing houses that acted as buyers to every seller and sellers to every buyer, we started to net portfolio positions, we started to do order entry and ownership. We had to unravel the whole system to make this new system work.”

Dan Morehead, founder of Pantera Capital, also mentioned the changing political zeitgeist:

“There used to be a large group of people in Congress who were against crypto… Out of the 58 disputed elections that were in favor of crypto, 54 people who were against crypto left Congress. No one is saying a bad thing about crypto in Congress anymore.”

Ondo’s Highlights

While I may be biased because Pantera led Ondo’s seed round and co-led its Series A, I believe Ondo is the only company that is laser-focused on solving the convergence of blockchain and traditional finance.

Ondo also announced Ondo Chain, a full-chain network of RWAs. This chain solves two problems: making on-chain returns more attractive/accessible to off-chain investors, and connecting on-chain users with off-chain products/returns.

The problem is simple.

The financial plumbing of today’s world is built on the assumption of distrust and is often subject to checks and balances. If I want to buy a stock, my money goes through my bank or payment processor, a brokerage firm, possibly a market maker, a stock exchange, a clearing firm, a custodian bank, and possibly a transfer agent. Those are the 7 intermediaries to buy a stock.

And if I’m not happy with my current bank’s savings rate, I’ll have to sign up for an account at another bank, which will take days and may require redoing anti-money laundering and identity checks and creating new, duplicate documents.

On-chain, a single wallet can interact trustlessly with any market directly, without any middlemen or the need to create new accounts for every transaction.

Ondo’s vision is to make the line between traditional finance and blockchain disappear, powered by Ondo Chain and the broader Ondo infrastructure. Investors will be able to instruct their bank to send a SWIFT bank wire to a user on the chain, which can be done in one go through Ondo Chain. Similarly, global investors will be able to purchase securities on Ondo Chain, which will translate into a buy order on the TradFi exchange. Similarly, institutional investors will be able to pledge their treasuries as collateral in the traditional repo market, but convert the resulting cash into a yield coin asset that they can use in DeFi. Powered by Ondo Chain and the infrastructure that Ondo is building, the lines between the financial silos that currently exist will continue to blur.

Ondo Chain will allow for 24/7 trading, global assets, easier compliance, better interest rates, and new investment opportunities.

Shovel seller during the gold rush

On-chain real-world assets are growing at an accelerating rate ($8.5 billion at the beginning of 2024 vs. $17 billion at the beginning of 2025) as it benefits both token creators and buyers.

On-chain users can earn income from off-chain sources, while RWA creators can hold a large amount of assets, collect a small fee, and invest it elsewhere for additional income. RWA provides strong support for DeFi because it brings some trust guarantees of on-chain RWA income, which can be overcollateralized, margin traded, and wrapped to create unlimited derivative tokens. In fact, one dollar of RWA can increase the GDP of the on-chain economy several times.

Ondo Global Markets allows access to tokens backed 1:1 by traditional assets, Bridge transfers RWA tokens across chains, and Nexus provides instant minting and redemption for customers. Instead of having to have their own proprietary channels, each bank can use Ondo Chain to eliminate the administrative bloat of traditional finance while allowing users to easily earn on-chain returns and providing developers with a single platform to build without having to work with each bank to create products.

DeFi promised the dream of financial accessibility, interoperability, and transparency. More than a decade later, we may finally have the infrastructure to connect the web2 world with web3. -Paul Veradittakit