Crypto has a velvet rope, and for most of the last decade only two names were on the list: Bitcoin and Ether. Everybody else got patted down at the door.

That isn’t a conspiracy theory. It’s a paper trail. And Thursday’s Ondo–BlackRock launch is the latest sign that the people actually building financial plumbing on-chain have stopped waiting for the bouncer.

The free pass, receipts included

In June 2018, the SEC’s then–corporation finance director William Hinman told a Yahoo Finance audience that when he looked at Bitcoin he did not “see a central third party whose efforts are a key determining factor,” and that “current offers and sales of Ether are not securities transactions.” It was a speech, not a Commission rule — his own footnote says so — but the market heard a hall pass.

On Jan. 10, 2024, the SEC approved spot bitcoin ETPs. Then-Chair Gary Gensler’s statement said the action was “cabined to ETPs holding one non-security commodity, bitcoin,” while adding that “the vast majority of crypto assets are investment contracts.” Translation: BTC, come on in. Everyone else, wait outside. Spot ether ETF listings were approved on May 23, 2024.

XRP spent that same stretch in court. The SEC sued Ripple in December 2020. In July 2023, Judge Analisa Torres ruled that XRP sold on public exchanges wasn’t covered by securities laws while institutional sales were. The case only ended when both sides dropped their appeals in August 2025, leaving a $125 million penalty in place. The first U.S. spot XRP ETF, Canary’s XRPC, started trading on Nov. 13, 2025, nearly two years after bitcoin’s.

So yes: BTC and ETH got the first-mover brand, early regulatory comfort and the default slot in every “crypto is up today” headline. A head start is a real advantage. It is not tenure.

Thursday’s Exhibit A: Ondo × BlackRock

Here’s what actually happened. On Sept. 24, 2026, Ondo Finance launched Ondo Intelligent Portfolios: three on-chain tokens — BLKHIon (high income), BLKDIGon (diversified growth) and BLKGRWon (high growth) — built on portfolio strategies BlackRock developed for Ondo. Ondo issues them through Ondo Global Markets, and only eligible investors outside the U.S. can buy them. Holdings, weights and every rebalance are visible on-chain, and the tokens can move between wallets, exchanges and DeFi apps.

Read the fine print, because The Crypto Times did. BlackRock is not the adviser, manager or sponsor of the tokens. Ondo also discloses that BlackRock has a potential conflict of interest, since the strategies include BlackRock funds. So this is “powered by BlackRock,” not “run by BlackRock.”

The market didn’t wait for the footnotes. ONDO was up about 25% over 24 hours, near $0.51, with a market cap of about $2.5 billion (CoinPaprika, 1:31 p.m. MT). Finbold, citing RWA.xyz, put Ondo’s tokenized assets above $3.8 billion.

The free-pass point: this is a BlackRock-designed strategy wrapped around tokenized stocks and ETFs, with rules-based rebalancing, and nobody needed bitcoin to build it. (Plot twist: ONDO itself is an ERC-20 token on Ethereum. Utility doesn’t read the tribal memo.)

Sponsored

High Noon Solar

Solar for Colorado’s Western Slope

Sales, install, and service out of Grand Junction since 2005.

Learn more

XRPL’s version of “actually doing stuff”

The XRP Ledger crowd has receipts too. Ondo put its tokenized Treasury fund OUSG on XRPL on June 11, 2025, with around-the-clock minting and redemption in Ripple’s RLUSD stablecoin. OUSG’s portfolio includes BlackRock’s BUIDL fund.

  • RLUSD market cap was near $2.36 billion on Thursday, and Binance will hand out $800,000 in XRP to eligible RLUSD holders from Sept. 25 to Oct. 23. U.S. residents are excluded (Coinpedia).
  • Permission Delegation, which lets bank-style issuers split payment and compliance duties without handing over master keys, entered a 14-day countdown with 29 of 35 validators in favor. The earliest activation window is Oct. 5 (CoinDesk).
  • U.S. spot XRP ETFs took in $18.04 million on Wednesday, bringing cumulative inflows to about $1.75 billion (SoSoValue via The Crypto Times).

Regulators are also changing the subject. The SEC’s new temporary exemption lets qualifying venues trade tokenized stocks through permissioned AMM pools. To be clear, it does not approve XRPL’s public AMM. But the question has moved from “is this coin a security?” to “how do tokenized securities trade on-chain?” That second question is a utility game, not a brand game.

Why bulls think the pass expires

The bull case goes like this: once asset managers ship on-chain products and regulators write rules for tokenized securities, the market stops asking which coin is digital gold and starts asking which rails settle the stuff. That’s the pitch from XRPL, Ondo and the stablecoin-heavy chains. If the money follows the plumbing, bulls argue, the gap between brand value and actual use should shrink. That’s an argument, not a promise.

The counterpoint (read this part twice)

  • The scoreboard still favors the incumbents. Bitcoin is about 56.3% of a roughly $3.02 trillion crypto market, and BTC plus ETH together are about two-thirds. XRP, at about $96 billion, is around 3% (CoinPaprika).
  • So do the ETF flows. Spot bitcoin ETFs took in about $347 million on Wednesday alone and $2.65 billion over five sessions. BlackRock’s IBIT took in about $166 million that day, roughly nine days of XRP ETF inflows at Wednesday’s pace (Cointelegraph).
  • Partnerships aren’t paychecks. ONDO is a governance token. A BlackRock-branded product doesn’t automatically send value to it, and BlackRock isn’t managing these tokens.
  • Price hasn’t followed use, at least not yet. In 2026 so far, BTC is down about 4.7%, ETH about 10.2% and XRP about 18.4%, while ONDO is up about 33% (Yahoo Finance daily closes, chart above). XRP fell about 8.5% to $1.46 on Thursday even as its ETFs took in money. Ethereum, meanwhile, hosts a big share of the tokenization story itself.

Bottom line

The free pass was real, and it bought Bitcoin and Ether a decade of brand equity. But a head start isn’t a lifetime membership. Every tokenized fund, stablecoin rail and on-chain portfolio launched somewhere else chips away at the idea that crypto is a two-coin story. Whether that turns into price is the market’s call, and the market is famously bad at being on time. Not investment advice.

Sources