Crypto: NEAR Partners with Ondo for Tokenized and Confidential U.S. Stocks

Wall Street without brokers or opening hours. NEAR Protocol partners with Ondo Finance to integrate tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs directly into the Near application. Orders will be executed confidentially, a rare promise in markets where every transaction is recorded transparently on a public ledger.

A partnership that brings together two of the most contested areas in crypto: the tokenization of traditional financial assets and the confidentiality of on-chain exchanges.

Key Points

• NEAR Protocol integrates Ondo Global Markets' tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs into near.com, accessible from a single multi-chain account.
• Confidential execution relies on TEE, hardware enclaves that mask order details while publishing a verifiable result on-chain.
• Ondo maintains its KYC process and regulated entities: confidentiality pertains to the order book, not the investor's identity.
• Backed, Robinhood, and Coinbase compete in the same space, with products that remain closed to U.S. residents.

Ondo Global Markets Joins the Single Account at near.com

Ondo Finance has built a reputation in the realm of real-world assets (RWA) through OUSG and USDY, two products backed by U.S. sovereign debt. Its Ondo Global Markets range aims broader, with around a hundred tokenized U.S. assets and indices, from Apple to Nvidia, including SPY and QQQ. Under the hood, each token is backed by a real asset held by a custodian, and the creation-redemption mechanism operates well beyond the NYSE's opening hours.

The Near.com application provides the other half of the setup. The account aggregates multiple blockchains behind a single multi-chain identity via NEAR Intents. This is an inter-chain settlement layer that allows the exchange of an asset from one network to another without going through a traditional bridge. Tokenized stocks will coexist with stablecoins and user tokens, without juggling multiple wallets or multiplying private keys.

Confidential Execution: NEAR's Technical Argument

Transparency has been a historical foundation of cryptocurrencies. However, in the age of MEV bots, some transactions do not benefit from being public. Indeed, a buy order for two million dollars in Nvidia stocks appears in the mempool of a public blockchain even before its confirmation. Quickly, arbitrage bots spot it and position themselves ahead to profit at the user's expense from the impact of their purchase. For an investor moving significant positions, the full transparency of the ledger comes at a cost.

NEAR responds with TEEs (Trusted Execution Environments), hardware enclaves that process encrypted data within the processor itself. The result of the operation is published and verifiable on-chain, but the order details remain masked. Thus, NEAR extends its confidential balance module beyond its tokens to also include tokenized financial assets.

However, confidentiality stops at the public order book. Indeed, Ondo operates through registered entities and imposes, unsurprisingly, a KYC on its users so that investors remain perfectly identified in the eyes of the law.

Tokenized Stocks: Crypto Advances Faster than Law

The niche is already attracting the biggest players. Backed has deployed its xStocks on Solana before distributing them through Kraken and Bybit, Robinhood has opened its tokenized stocks to European clients on Arbitrum, and Coinbase is pushing the SEC to allow the format on U.S. soil. All these products share the same limitation: they remain closed to U.S. residents.

<< Tokenized securities remain financial securities. >>

Hester Peirce, SEC Commissioner

The commissioner's formula is often brandished as a green light. It mainly serves as a reminder of obligations: a token backed by an Apple stock does not escape U.S. securities law or distribution rules. The volume of tokenized stocks still weighs little compared to tokenized Treasury bonds, whose market counts in billions of dollars, and the next step will be played out on distribution rather than technology.

The real benefit of the setup comes after the purchase. A tokenized stock housed in near.com can serve as collateral in a lending protocol, be exchanged for a stablecoin in seconds, or move from one blockchain to another—three operations that no traditional brokerage account offers its clients.