On July 14, 2025, Ondo Finance acquired Strangelove. I’m joining as Vice President of Product.

This is the culmination of seven years of work—from writing the first IBC relayer at Tendermint, to building validator infrastructure, to founding Strangelove and scaling it to 30+ engineers shipping critical Cosmos infrastructure. Now that work continues at a company positioned to bring traditional finance onto public blockchains.

Why Ondo#

Ondo is building the infrastructure for tokenized real-world assets. Treasury bills, money market funds, institutional-grade securities—assets that move trillions of dollars in traditional finance, brought onchain with proper custody, compliance, and settlement.

The thesis is straightforward: traditional financial infrastructure is slow, expensive, and fragmented. Blockchain rails can fix that. But only if the infrastructure is built for institutions—permissioned validators, compliant custody, oracles that work with real financial data.

That’s the problem Strangelove knows how to solve.

What Strangelove Brings#

We spent years building infrastructure that nobody else would build. The Go Relayer. Interchaintest. Horcrux. Packet Forward Middleware. The Noble chain for Circle’s native USDC.

Every one of those projects solved the same meta-problem: how do you build production-grade blockchain infrastructure that institutions can trust? Infrastructure that doesn’t break. Infrastructure that handles edge cases. Infrastructure with real testing and proper security.

Ondo needs exactly that. They’re not building a toy. They’re building rails for global financial markets. That requires the kind of battle-tested engineering we’ve done for the Cosmos ecosystem.

Over the years we’ve built infrastructure for Osmosis, dYdX, Celestia, Composable, Noble, Thorchain, Wormhole, Hyperlane, Agoric, and the Interchain Foundation. The Interchain Foundation funded our maintenance of core IBC tooling. We’ve operated validators across the ecosystem. We’ve shipped code that moves billions of dollars. That experience matters when the stakes are this high.

What Changes#

Strangelove is winding down validator operations. If you delegate to us, please redelegate to other operators.

The open source work continues. Interchaintest, the relayer, PFM—these tools serve the broader ecosystem and that doesn’t stop. But the team’s primary focus shifts to Ondo’s infrastructure needs.

This isn’t an exit. It’s an evolution. When we started Strangelove (back when it was called Pylon Validation), the vision was to replace traditional finance rails with decentralized alternatives. That mission is more achievable at Ondo than anywhere else.

The Opportunity#

Tokenized assets are coming. BlackRock has a tokenized money market fund. JPMorgan is doing cross-chain settlement. The question isn’t whether this happens—it’s who builds the infrastructure.

Ondo’s approach—combining institutional compliance with public blockchain accessibility—is the right architecture. Same insight as Noble: be the neutral layer that both issuers and users trust.

We’re hiring. If you want to build the financial infrastructure of the next decade, reach out.

The announcement: Ondo Finance Acquires Strangelove