Ondo Perps CEO David Wells sees a great opportunity for perpetual futures in the US market, although any onshore option will differ from the platform the company currently offers to users outside the US. He shared this in an interview with The Block at an Ondo event in Seoul, South Korea.
"Everyone is looking at the US because more opportunities are opening up now that were simply impossible before," Wells said. "It will be a different product than what we've seen. Perpetual futures in the US are structured somewhat differently than markets outside the country, and we'll see how that develops." However, he did not confirm plans to expand into the US and noted that the team has not gone "too far" in exploring this market. According to him, two different models will eventually emerge – one for the US and one for the rest of the world.
The comment came amid US regulators and several companies testing approaches to launching perpetual futures domestically. Kraken, through Bitnomial Exchange and NinjaTrader Clearing, plans to list Hyperliquid's HIP-3 markets for qualified US clients – under an approved structure with a regulated wrapper, rather than simply opening an offshore application for US traders. Coinbase has also applied to launch single-stock perps in the US. Ondo Finance itself previously sent letters to the SEC and CFTC arguing that perpetual contracts on US stocks fall under the category of security futures under the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000.
According to Wells, the contract and market structure in the American version will likely be similar, but the settlement and clearing will need to be adapted to US regulations.
Ondo Perps was launched in July this year as an offshore platform in Panama for trading tokenized US stocks, stock ETFs, and commodities. Traders can use USDC or suitable Ondo Stocks tokens as margin, with leverage up to 20x on individual contracts. The platform's uniqueness, according to Wells, is that it allows the use of tokenized stocks as collateral while remaining invested in the underlying asset – this is more capital-efficient than platforms where the margin is only in stablecoins.
On Monday, Ondo Perps announced that it is now possible to buy and sell 12 Ondo Stocks tokens on the platform, and the list will be expanded to include all Ondo Stocks in the future. Since the launch of the closed beta, the platform has accumulated about $14 billion in trading volume, and open interest recently exceeded $100 million. Wells noted that the volume includes retail traders, institutional market makers and hedgers, B2B2C channels, and aggregators.
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