Ondo Finance hires ex-Invesco ETF chief to build onchain…

Ondo Finance has appointed John Hoffman as managing director and head of product portfolios, tasking him with expanding the firm's tokenization business from individual assets into fully managed onchain investment portfolios. Hoffman spent nearly two decades at Invesco — a $2.5 trillion asset manager — where he most recently led ETF and index strategies for the Americas, before moving to Grayscale Investments as head of distribution and partnerships.

"Our next step is building the world's most trusted platform for intelligently managed, onchain investment portfolios," Hoffman told CoinDesk. "It took 30 years for ETFs to go from niche product to the default vehicle. Onchain finance will compress that timeline dramatically."

Why it matters

The hire signals that Ondo is deliberately importing institutional ETF distribution expertise into the tokenization stack — not just building the rails, but packaging products that asset managers and wealth platforms can actually sell. Ondo already has traction: its tokenized Treasury products OUSG and USDY are live, and Ondo Global Markets has surpassed $1 billion in total value locked across more than 250 stocks and ETFs. The broader market context is equally compelling — tokenized assets have nearly tripled in a year to over $30 billion, with Citi projecting $5.5 trillion by 2030 and a BCG-Ripple report estimating $18.9 trillion by 2033.

Market impact

BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, Fidelity and JPMorgan are all active in tokenized products, but Ondo's move to hire a seasoned ETF distribution executive suggests the competitive edge in this cycle will belong to firms that can bundle tokenized assets into managed strategies — not just mint them.