From decrypt by Mat Di Salvo

A new blockchain for tokenizing real-world assets—or RWAs—was announced on Thursday with the backing of Wall Street giants. 

The layer-1 Ondo Chain—a product of Ondo Finance, which works to tokenize assets—will work “to accelerate the creation of institutional-grade financial markets on-chain,” according to a statement. 

And Team Trump immediately jumped on the bandwagon: Data from Arkham Intelligence showed that a wallet linked to the President Trump-backed World Liberty Financial project scooped up $470,000 worth of the project’s native ONDO tokens. 

World Liberty Financial is a crypto project providing borrowing and lending services. It has the heavy backing of the Trump brand; the president’s son announced its launch back in August, and the president himself has promoted the project.

Following the purchase, Donald Trump Jr. was announced as the surprise closing speaker at Thursday's Ondo Summit event.

Ondo Finance said that top asset managers will be able to tokenize their assets leading to more transparency, less fraud, and the opportunity for clients to earn yield. It added that Franklin Templeton, Wellington Management, WisdomTree, and Google Cloud served as “design advisors” for the Ethereum Virtual Machine-compatible chain. 

“We believe that Ondo Chain represents a significant step forward in the evolution of institutional-grade blockchain infrastructure,” Thursday’s statement read.

The Ethereum-based ONDO is now the 33rd biggest cryptocurrency, with a market cap of $4.3 billion, CoinGecko shows.

Institutions in the traditional finance world have been banging the RWA drum for some time now. BlackRock boss Larry Fink praised Ethereum for how it would lead to the tokenization of financial markets, while Franklin Templeton CEO Jenny Johnson has said that the technology of securities will change thanks to the blockchain. 

“[Blockchain] technology is going to open up a lot of really interesting types of investment opportunities,” Johnson said last year.