BlackRock and Ondo put entire investment portfolios onchain as tokenisation enters its next phase

BlackRock has partnered with Ondo Finance to package three professionally constructed investment strategies, focused on high income, diversified growth, and high growth, into individual tokens on the blockchain, distributed through Ondo’s Intelligent Portfolios platform. Rather than requiring investors to purchase and rebalance constituent holdings separately, each token represents the whole portfolio strategy as a single transferable instrument.

The structural novelty goes beyond what mutual funds and exchange-traded funds have historically offered. Because the portfolio itself sits onchain, it can move between wallets and platforms, be used as collateral, and be connected to other financial products in ways that conventional fund structures do not permit. Lisa O’Connor, BlackRock’s global head of model portfolio solutions, described the arrangement as tokenisation creating new ways for portfolio strategies to be delivered through digital infrastructure.

A parallel initiative from Bitwise, launched in August with Coinbase and Glider, takes a different architectural approach: eligible non-US investors follow Bitwise-designed portfolios of tokenised stocks while the underlying assets remain in their own wallets, with Glider’s software automatically rebalancing to target weights. Ondo wraps exposure into a single transferable token; Bitwise leaves the assets disaggregated and manages allocation in software. Both approaches point toward portfolio management becoming a software layer operating directly on blockchain-based assets.

The commercial context is substantial. Model portfolios held approximately 9.8 trillion dollars in assets as of June, according to data cited from Broadridge, and crypto investment firm Pantera characterised the shift in a recent report as moving from single securities to onchain portfolios. Analysts at Pantera noted that for investors the practical change is a reduction in the number of positions and rebalancing decisions they need to manage themselves. The question now is how quickly wealth management distribution infrastructure catches up with the product architecture these firms are already building.