RWA news: Ondo Finance adds proxy voting for holders of its $700 million tokenized equities

Ondo Finance is bringing tokenized equities closer to their traditional counterparts, offering investors a way to participate in corporate governance.

The feature, built with Broadridge Financial Solutions (BR), allows holders of more than 250 tokenized securities on Ondo’s platform to review company filings and submit voting preferences through Broadridge’s ProxyVote system.

Investors can log in with crypto wallets, then access documents and governance tools typically reserved for brokerage accounts.

The move comes as tokenized equities have emerged as one of the fastest-growing sectors in crypto, bringing stocks and ETFs on blockchain rails. The category now holds over $1.1 billion in value locked, tripling in size over the past year, RWA.xyz data shows. Ondo is the largest issuer in the sector, reporting more than $700 million in stock and ETF tokens on its Global Markets platform, offered to non-U.S. investors.

Adding proxy voting to equity tokens matters because these offerings have often lacked basic governance rights. While Ondo’s tokens remain separate from the underlying shares and do not grant direct shareholder rights, the new system lets investors express preferences that Ondo can apply when voting the shares it holds.

“It really hits at the heart of Ondo’s vision to make traditional financial assets more accessible,” Matthieu de Vergnes, Ondo’s global head of institutional, said in an interview with CoinDesk. “You get all the benefits of being onchain – freely transferable, compatible with DeFi – and on top of that, you get the governance that you have from the the underlying.”

Broadridge, which processes large volumes of proxy votes in traditional markets, is extending its infrastructure to blockchain systems with this move. The firm said the goal is to support both digital and conventional assets within the same workflows.

Giving investors the same level of auditability, transparency and compliance will “really go a long way in making the tokenized world more scalable, giving that level of trust to end investors,” said Danielle Gurrieri, senior vice president and head of product management at Broadridge.