Asset catalog

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The catalog at a glance

Ondo alone contributes 443 assets across the three asset classes, and the catalog grows every time Passage connects to another tokenization platform. See Asset partners for what each partner issues and what ownership of their tokens actually means.

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Understanding the asset classes

These primers are written for readers without a finance background.

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What is a stock?

A stock is an ownership share in a company. If you own a share of Apple, you own a piece of Apple. Your share entitles you to the economic upside of the company, dividends, and other rights like voting. When the company becomes more valuable, your share generally does too, and some companies pay owners a portion of profits as dividends. Stocks can trade on public exchanges, where prices move constantly based on what buyers and sellers think the company is worth. There are also private shares that don’t trade on major exchanges, but are purchased directly from the company or existing investors.

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What is a tokenized stock?

A tokenized stock is a blockchain token that represents a share. Instead of holding shares in a brokerage account, your users hold a token in their own wallet. The token’s value tracks the underlying stock, and it moves and settles like any other digital asset, including outside US market hours and without a registered brokerage relationship. One thing worth knowing is that not all tokenized stocks are created equally. Some represent direct, real ownership of the underlying share. Others are wrapped exposure, which tracks the price but carries different rights. See Asset partners for how this works issuer by issuer.

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What is a fund?

A fund represents a basket of assets managed by an asset manager, for example WisdomTree. Funds can be managed actively, meaning the asset manager makes discretionary decisions on how to manage the portfolio, or passively, meaning the fund follows an existing asset allocation strategy or index. Some funds may be publicly traded like ETFs, while others may be private and not actively traded. There are many types of funds that represent exposure across all asset classes. A large share of the funds in the catalog are index funds, which track a basket of assets rather than a single one. The S&P 500 tracks 500 of the largest US companies, so one S&P 500 fund gives a user diversified exposure to the broad US stock market rather than a bet on any one company. Index funds sit in the asset class they track, so an S&P 500 fund is listed under Equities and a Treasury bond fund under Fixed income.

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What is a yield product?

A yield product covers a broad category of different types of financial assets. A yield product typically pays a return over time. The most common example is a US Treasury, which is a loan to the US government that pays interest and returns the principal at maturity. Because the US government backs them, US Treasuries are widely treated as one of the lowest-risk investments in the world, and their interest rate is often used as the baseline “risk-free” rate. Tokenized Treasury products let users hold that exposure as a token that accrues yield. Corporate debt works the same way, except the borrowers are companies rather than the government. That usually means a higher yield in exchange for more risk.

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What is a commodity?

A commodity is a physical good that trades on a market, like gold, silver, oil, or natural gas. Prices move with global supply and demand rather than with the performance of any one company, which is why commodities are often held as a hedge against inflation or as diversification away from stocks. Users rarely take delivery of the physical good. Instead they hold a fund that owns it on their behalf, such as a gold trust that stores bullion in a vault, or a fund that tracks the commodity through futures contracts. Tokenized commodity products deliver that exposure as a single token. Passage also groups commodity-linked equity funds here, such as copper and uranium miner funds, because users buy them for exposure to the underlying commodity.