ONDO Finance launches ONDO Network as evolution of its planned blockchain for real-world assets

Ondo Finance just shipped the thing it’s been talking about for over a year, though it looks a bit different than what was originally promised. The Ondo Network, which went live on July 27, is what the company calls the “evolution” of Ondo Chain, the standalone Layer 1 blockchain it first announced back in February 2025 for tokenizing real-world assets. In English: instead of building an entirely new blockchain from scratch, Ondo pivoted to something more pragmatic. A hybrid execution layer that handles trades privately and quickly while still settling on existing public chains like Ethereum. What the Ondo Network actually does The architecture is split into two distinct systems. The first layer uses secure hardware enclaves to handle trade execution, processing transactions with speed and privacy. The second layer is a decentralized multi-party attestor network that handles verification and key management. Assets ultimately settle on public blockchains, preserving transparency. The first major application running on the network is Ondo Perps, a perpetual futures trading platform that went live publicly on July 7. The platform offers 24/7 trading with up to 20x leverage. Ondo Perps...