Profile · Onchain Markets
David Wells
The markets builder taking leveraged equity trading onchain as CEO of Ondo Perps.
David Wells · Enclave Markets / Ondo Perps
The markets builder taking leveraged equity trading onchain as CEO of Ondo Perps.
David Wells runs Ondo Perps, the equity-perpetuals arm of Ondo Finance, and the job description reads like a dare. Take leading U.S. stocks, ETFs, and commodities. Wrap them in perpetual futures. Let a trader in Lagos or Lisbon go long Nvidia at 20x leverage, 24 hours a day, using tokenized shares they already hold as the collateral. Do it onchain, and do it with the kind of execution a hedge fund would recognize.
That is the venue Wells is building. Ondo Perps launched in July 2026 as the first equity-perpetuals platform to accept tokenized stock and ETF holdings directly as collateral, meaning traders no longer have to scatter capital across a dozen accounts just to keep a position open. The pitch is capital efficiency, and the technology under the hood is largely the stack Wells has spent years assembling.
His argument for why any of this matters is refreshingly unromantic. Crypto's markets, he says, have grown up. The wild inefficiencies of the early years have narrowed. But narrowed is not the same as gone, and Wells has built a career on finding the seams. "Crypto's markets have matured," he told The Block, "but there's still inefficiencies to profit from." Ondo Perps is his latest attempt to build a better place to do exactly that.
The number he keeps returning to is scale. Perpetuals have grown into an roughly $86 trillion market in crypto. Traditional derivatives are larger still, measured in the quadrillions. Equity perps, in his framing, sit right at the intersection of those two worlds, which is a polite way of saying the addressable market is very, very large.
Before Ondo, there was Enclave Markets. Wells founded it in 2022, incubated inside Ava Labs, the team behind the Avalanche blockchain, and gave himself an unusually hard first assignment: build an exchange where nobody could see the order book. Not competing traders. Not even the people operating the venue.
He did it by running the entire matching engine inside a secure enclave, a piece of hardware that keeps the data sealed off from everyone touching the machine. Enclave billed itself as the world's first Fully Encrypted Exchange, or FEX, and it offered dark pools, spot markets, alpha strategies, and both permissioned and permissionless perpetuals. The thread running through it was fairness: a market where no participant has a structural peek at anyone else's hand.
Wells took that idea on the road, appearing on stage at Avalanche Summit II to introduce the FEX model and sitting down with Avalanche founder Emin Gun Sirer to talk through the problems he saw baked into conventional exchanges. His goal, he said, was to democratize access to institutional strategies, "bringing tools once reserved for hedge funds to a broader class of digital asset participants." The same sentence could describe Ondo Perps.
Encrypted order flow at Enclave; institutional-grade execution for everyone at Ondo Perps.
One pool of collateral, not five accounts. Tokenized stocks post directly against positions.
Global, 24/7 trading for investors outside the U.S. and other restricted markets.
The unglamorous plumbing of markets: matching, liquidity, custody, compliance.
Investors hold tokenized U.S. equities and ETFs onchain instead of parking cash on a trading venue.
Those tokenized holdings are posted directly as collateral, a first for an equity-perps platform, so capital is not fragmented.
Traders take leveraged perpetual positions on names like NVDA, TSLA, AAPL, indices, gold, and oil, around the clock.
David Wells is the CEO of Ondo Perps, the equity-perpetuals platform of Ondo Finance. He previously founded and led Enclave Markets, the first Fully Encrypted Exchange, and held roles at Two Sigma and Paxos.
Ondo Perps is a platform for trading perpetual futures on leading U.S. stocks, ETFs, and commodities. It is the first to allow tokenized stock and ETF holdings to be posted directly as collateral, and offers up to 20x leverage to eligible investors outside the U.S.
Enclave Markets, founded by Wells, was billed as the world's first Fully Encrypted Exchange (FEX), built inside a secure enclave so that no party, including the operators, could read order activity. It was incubated within Ava Labs.
He served as VP of Strategy and Product Development at the quantitative firm Two Sigma and previously held a general manager role at the stablecoin and infrastructure company Paxos.
David Wells attended Harvard Business School from 2013 to 2015.