Ondo Finance on July 27 launched Ondo Network and described it as a strategic pivot away from its earlier plan to build a Layer 1 blockchain called Ondo Chain. The company said reaching its objective does not require “a blockchain in the traditional sense.”
Ondo says the bottleneck is execution, not settlement
Ondo described Ondo Network as a “verifiable execution layer” designed to be as fast and private as a centralized exchange, verifiable like a blockchain, and non-custodial by design.
The team said that while building Ondo Perps and speaking with clients, it concluded that settlement was not the main constraint. In its view, blockchains are already strong at settlement. The harder problem is execution speed and privacy in trading. Ondo said traditional blockchain architecture does not solve that issue, which led it to separate execution from settlement and optimize each one on its own.
Two-layer design: secure enclaves and an attestor layer
Ondo Network has two core components. The first is a secure enclave. Applications run privately inside trusted execution environments, or TEEs, which are hardware-isolated environments. Ondo said this allows performance closer to centralized exchanges while also generating cryptographically signed logs for every state change.
The second component is the attestor layer. This consists of decentralized independent operators that verify programs, hold split key fragments, and connect the network to public blockchains. Ondo said no single party can hold the complete key, and even an operator that controls the underlying infrastructure cannot extract it.
The company said the overall design provides low latency, privacy protection, verifiable fairness, and non-custodial operation.
Ondo Perps is the first product on the network
The initial launch tied to Ondo Network is Ondo Perps, a professional-grade perpetuals platform that uses tokenized real-world assets as collateral.
Ondo said it sees the infrastructure as general-purpose. It said the design could later extend to spot markets, structured products, lending, settlement rails, and even non-financial applications that require verifiable program execution.
Its roadmap includes opening the attestor layer on a permissionless basis, putting settled state on-chain, and developing a proof-of-stake security model.