On the evening of May 25th (UTC), Ondo Finance announced on X that its founder and CEO, Nathan Allman, had passed away unexpectedly at the age of 32. The cause of death was not disclosed. The following day, May 26th, Bitget, which holds 70% of Ondo's token supply, launched its own RWA tokenization platform—Reality. Even without this coincidence, this event was bound to happen sooner or later. Allman was a rare breed of builder in the crypto world—a graduate of Brown University with degrees in economics and biology, a Stanford MBA, and a background in Goldman Sachs' digital asset team. He left Goldman Sachs in 2021 to found Ondo Finance, and in less than five years built it into the world's largest tokenized real-world asset platform: a TVL of $3.86 billion, covering 13 chains, and at one point holding nearly 70% market share in tokenized stocks and ETFs. His two products, OUSG and USDY, brought US Treasury bonds and interest-bearing dollars onto the blockchain, achieving unprecedented scale. Colleagues described him as "technically precise and exceptionally calm"—a combination extremely rare in an industry that rewards noise. He wasn't a promoter; he was a builder. Ripple CTO David Schwartz publicly called him a "thoughtful leader," and CZ also posted a message of condolence. Regardless of how the industry landscape evolves, Nathan Allman's contribution to the RWA sector is foundational. He made Wall Street take tokenization seriously, and made BlackRock and JPMorgan stop treating tokenization as a toy. The industry should remember this achievement. RIP Nathan Allman. According to a Coindoo report on March 20th of this year, Bitget contributed approximately 89% of the trading volume of Ondo's tokenized shares, which has now dropped to around 70%. Ondo is the issuer, but the lifeline of distribution and trading is in Bitget's hands. This structure is inherently fragile—what happens to the upstream when the channel decides to handle the issuance itself? The answer is Reality. On May 26th, Bitget launched its Reality platform, issuing its own rTokens—on-chain tokens with a 1:1 ratio to US stocks and ETFs, with underlying assets custodied by a US brokerage firm, CPA and smart contract audits, stablecoin dividends, 24/7 minting and redemption, and automatic updates for stock splits and reverse splits. In short: the platform itself has entered the fray. This is strikingly similar to the old story of Amazon's self-operated and third-party sellers—the platform sees which category is performing well, so it creates its own. Ondo, for Bitget, is the player that validated the market, cultivated users, and then watched its market share be taken away. Reality essentially adds "collateralization + opening positions" functionality to what Ondo did. At the tokenized stock layer, there's no fundamental difference between the two—1:1 to US stocks, compliant brokerage firm custody, on-chain token issuance. Bitget's extra step is that rTokens can be used as margin collateral for a unified account for opening positions.Holding tokenized Apple or Tesla stock isn't just about predicting price movements—you can use it as margin to trade forex, gold, commodities, and other assets. Combining US stocks with forex, gold, and commodities, a single account covering multiple asset classes—the idea is indeed excellent. This gives users a reason to perform cross-asset allocation within a single platform. However, an unavoidable question arises: is this the same path as RWA perps? RWA perpetual contracts are growing at an astonishing rate. According to CoinGecko's "RWA Report 2026," in Q1 of 2026 alone, the total trading volume of RWA perps reached $524.8 billion, already exceeding the $313 billion for the entire year of 2025. Trade.XYZ, as a leading deployer of RWA perps, ranks first in daily trading volume on Loris Tools (data as of May 23, 2026, total daily RWA perps $4.63 billion). More noteworthy is the asset category structure: According to The Block's March 17 report, of Trade.XYZ's top 30 trading pairs, only 7 are cryptocurrencies, while the remaining 23 are all traditional assets—S&P 500, Nasdaq, stock futures, gold, silver, and crude oil. The main driver of on-chain perp trading is no longer crypto, but RWA. Reality allows you to use tokenized Teslas as collateral to go long on gold or short on the euro. But on Hyperliquid, you can open the same position directly with USDC—no need to buy a tokenized stock first and then use it as collateral. Perps offers a shorter path, lower costs, and more flexible leverage. The infrastructure requirements for these two paths are on completely different levels. For CEXs to list tokenized stocks, each listing requires compliance, custody, auditing, dividends, and synchronization of company actions. Expanding from US stocks to Hong Kong, South Korea, and Taiwan stocks requires starting all over again for each market. Perp DEXs only need a reliable oracle, handling global assets with a single interface. The operational complexity differs by an order of magnitude, yet the trading experience is almost identical. Therefore, Reality's real competitor may not be Ondo, but rather the entire RWA perp ecosystem. When perps can already provide 24/7 synthetic exposure to US stocks, forex, and gold, is the intermediate step of using tokenized stocks as collateral for opening positions truly necessary? Or, from another perspective, Reality itself is a defensive response from CEXs to the rise of RWA perps on DEXs—using tokenized assets and unified margin to retain trading volume within its own ecosystem that might otherwise flow to Hyperliquid and Trade.XYZ. I must mention a judgment framework I proposed earlier—the "trading attributes" and "asset attributes" of US stock tokenization.The trading attribute refers to the tokenization of US stocks primarily for on-chain trading—the platform hopes users will buy and sell these tokenized US stocks on-chain. The asset attribute refers to the tokenization of US stocks to fully leverage their interest-bearing capacity as underlying assets, allowing holders to obtain stable income distributions. Over the past two years, all mainstream US stock tokenization platforms—Ondo, xStocks—have followed the trading attribute route. The result? After 16 months, the total value added (TVL) of the entire sector is only $1.1 billion. Meanwhile, perpetual contracts (Trade.xyz, Aster), which also allow users to trade US stock exposure, have achieved $6 billion. Perps are inherently better at trading than tokenization—faster, cheaper, and with more flexible leverage. Tokenizing a stock (even with margin and leverage) and then allowing trading is essentially using heavier infrastructure to do something perps can do with a lighter architecture. How large is the global investor demand for "extracting cash flow from stocks"? Just look at TradeFi's data. Our research covers 84 US equity return ETFs alone, with a total size of $698.9 billion (8.6% of all US equity ETFs). This includes $435.2 billion in high-dividend ETFs, $136.1 billion in covered call ETFs, and $127.5 billion in preferred stocks/REITs/MLPs. The most dramatic growth is in covered call ETFs—surging from $18 billion at the beginning of 2022 to $136.1 billion, more than sevenfold in three years. Single-stock covered call ETFs (represented by YieldMax, with 62 funds) grew from zero to $13.3 billion in just two or three years. BlackRock has also published a research white paper specifically on this category, predicting that the "outcome ETF" subcategory alone, including covered call ETFs, will grow from $181 billion to $650 billion by 2030, a 360% increase. Let's examine the robust cash flow these income-generating assets contribute: the weighted average dividend yield across all categories is approximately 5% (covered call ETFs reach 9-12%), resulting in over $35 billion in annual cash flow—currently 100% locked within the TradeFi system, almost invisible on-chain. The only minor breakthrough is Strategy's (formerly MicroStrategy) preferred stock, STRC, with an annualized dividend of 11.5%, which has been tokenized by protocols like Apyx and Saturn for approximately $270 million. However, $270 million is negligible compared to $700 billion. The market is large enough, and the demand is real enough. But why hasn't anyone brought these income-generating ETFs onto the blockchain yet? Because building and operating the infrastructure is extremely difficult.The tokenization of income-generating ETFs is not a simple 1:1 mapping or gaining exposure. It involves weekly/monthly dividend calculations and on-chain distribution, dynamic adjustments and maintenance of the underlying ETF holdings, daily NAV calculation and verification, building a compliant fund structure (fund of funds – sub-funds – SPV), and fiat currency clearing and on-chain settlement integration—each step is heavy and complex. This is why platforms like Ondo and xStocks opted for simple stock trading tokenization and never touched income-generating ETFs. It's not that they didn't want to, but that they couldn't. The true market for assets isn't about putting stocks on-chain for trading, but about bringing the ability of stocks to generate cash flow on-chain, allowing global users to participate and earn interest using stablecoins. Whoever can crack the operational hurdle will gain the next entry ticket. RWAlpha spent eight months building a complete tokenization engine for income-generating ETFs, covering the entire lifecycle from subscription to dividend payment to redemption. After more than a month of trial operation, it is now operating stably and paying dividends weekly. Core capabilities include: 5 business sub-engines, a 3-layer approval chain, and Fireblocks multi-signature custody. Specifically: Full-chain automation—Subscription order cutoff → ETF transaction confirmation → NAV pricing → Minting → Dividend payment → Redemption → Withdrawal, a fully automated closed loop. Direct connection to brokerage APIs—All ETF data is automatically obtained through brokerage APIs, with traceable data sources and timestamps, eliminating the risk of manual data entry. ETF tokens correspond 1:1 to the underlying ETF holdings. Three-layer approval chain—All on-chain operations must undergo three layers of approval before being uploaded to the blockchain via Fireblocks multi-signature. This aligns with the traditional financial "initiation-review-approval" process. Fireblocks Institutional Custody – Custody wallets are fully segregated by purpose, managed with MPC multi-signature, and each transaction has a dual record of Fireblocks TX ID + on-chain TX Hash. Smart Dividend Engine – Dividends are weighted based on the user's effective holdings × holding days, automatically deducting 30% of WHT + management fees. On-chain Verifiable Transparency – Token supply is read in real-time on-chain, and minting/burning/dividend distribution are all traceable via on-chain TX Hash. Adding an ETF product requires only simple configuration and can be launched within 24 hours. It already supports multi-chain deployments on BNB Chain and Mantle. But the engine is only half the battle. The other half is the end-to-end compliant financial infrastructure we've built with our partners: FOMO Group handles OTC fiat currency deposits and withdrawals, licensed broker MOOMOO undertakes the establishment and management of ETF underlying positions, and Fireblocks provides institutional-grade MPC custody and multi-signature fund control, with licensed institutions and an auditing chain backing each link. Moreover, the platform does not need to build this system from scratch.RWAlpha provides partners with a complete technology platform and a proprietary, transparent architecture—underlying holdings are transparent, on-chain funds are jointly managed, and even a dedicated compliant sub-fund structure. Partners don't need to "trust us"; they hold the keys themselves. Our first platform partner—the RWA Vault on a large public chain—is about to launch. Nathan Allman spent five years proving one thing: Wall Street assets can be moved on-chain, and someone is willing to pay for it. This is his gift to the entire industry. However, with the development of tokenized stocks, the trading attribute has been disproven by RWA Perps—lighter, faster, and cheaper synthetic exposures are swallowing everything up. The real value lies in the asset attributes—it will redefine the tokenization of US stocks. RWAlpha is willing to work with all partners who see this direction to move the cash flow of $700 billion in income-generating ETFs on-chain. We've built the infrastructure; you hold the keys. [Nathan on RWA]