Ondo Perps Review 2026: Fees, Rewards, How to Use and Referral Code

Ondo Perps review: the verdict

Ondo Perps does something no other perp venue we cover does: it lets you post tokenized stocks such as SPYon, QQQon, NVDAon or GLDon as margin next to USDC, so you can hold equity exposure and trade perps on the same balance. At the promotional 0.025% taker / 0.010% maker rate it is also one of the cheaper places to trade gold around the clock, and gold is where its volume is: 43% of the venue's 24-hour volume on October 22, 2026. For US stocks and indices it is not the cheapest: Hyperliquid's trade.xyz markets charge 0.009% taker in growth mode and traded about 9.4 times Ondo's total volume in the same minute (comparison). The trade-offs: it is a public beta with a $1M position cap per market, custody runs through a hot wallet guarded by secure enclaves rather than a public chain, and it is closed to US residents.

What is Ondo Perps?

Ondo Finance is best known for tokenized treasuries (OUSG, USDY) and for Ondo Global Markets, which issues tokenized US stocks and ETFs (the "on" tokens such as SPYon). Ondo Perps is the derivatives side: USD-settled perpetuals on those same underlyings, "made available by Ondo Global (Panama) Inc." according to the official docs. Its pitch to market makers is capital efficiency: a desk can quote the NVDA perp and hedge with NVDAon in the same account instead of posting stablecoins on one venue and holding stock at a broker.

Perps are named with a .P suffix (for example SPY-USD.P), with Market, Limit and TWAP orders, reduce-only, post-only and take-profit / stop-loss. You trade a derivative, not the share: no dividends, no voting rights, and the price you trade follows an oracle and the order book, not a stock exchange.

Ondo Perps fees: promo vs base

Source: docs.ondoperps.xyz/fees ("For a limited time, base trading fees are discounted 50% off") and the makerFee / takerFee fields of api.ondoperps.xyz/v1/perps/contracts, identical on every enabled market on October 22, 2026.

Volume tiers. The fee page adds that "actual fees may be lower depending on your 14-day rolling trading volume (volume-based fee tiers) or individual fee arrangements". No tier table is published, so for a normal account the promo rate above is what you pay.

What that means. At the promo rate a $10,000 taker round trip costs $5.00, or $4.75 with the 5% referral discount, against $9.00 for a crypto perp on Hyperliquid's base tier, $9.00 on edgeX and $0 on Lighter's Standard account. Hyperliquid's growth-mode stock perps (trade.xyz) cost about $1.80 for the same round trip, so for US stocks and indices Ondo is not the cheap option. When the promotion ends, the base $10.00 round trip is the most expensive of the four, so check the fee line in the order ticket, which labels the discount.

Funding: half rate on stock, index and gold perps

Funding is paid every hour, peer-to-peer, capped at ±1% an hour. It combines a premium with a fixed interest component of 0.03% per day. On stock, ETF, index, commodity and FX perps the whole rate (premium and interest) is multiplied by 0.5, at all times; crypto perps do not apply it. When a perp trades exactly at its oracle, longs therefore pay shorts:

Source: api.ondoperps.xyz/v1/markets (dailyInterestRate, fundingRateMultiplier, fundingRateCap) and docs weekend-trading.md ("This reduces the baseline annualized funding rate from approximately 11% to approximately 5.5%"), read October 22, 2026. The premium part moves with the market and can flip the sign.

Other charges. A 1.5% liquidation fee on the notional goes to the insurance fund (reduced if charging it in full would push your margin below maintenance). USDC withdrawals may carry a fee; tokenized-stock withdrawals do not, and Ondo pays the gas. If Auto-Exchange has to sell your stock collateral to cover USDC debt on a weekend or holiday, a 2.5% closed-market settlement fee applies.

Ondo Perps fee calculator

Rates from the facts registry (Ondo docs and API, October 22, 2026); volume is counted per fill, so opening and closing a $10,000 position is $20,000 of volume. Excludes funding and any builder fee charged by a third-party front-end.

Ondo Perps rewards: USDC pool, Ondo Points and campaigns

USDC Rewards are a cash pool set each week and shared by trading activity. Weeks run Tuesday to Monday (UTC) and rewards land in your trading account two days after the week closes, with no claim step; they show under Portfolio → Account Activity → Transfers. The pool was 100,000 USDC in week 1 (paid June 11, 2026) and has been 175,000 USDC a week since week 7; on October 22, 2026 the Rewards page showed week 21 at that amount, paying out on October 29, 2026.

What changes on October 26, 2026. Ondo Perps announced on October 20 that the single pool becomes three: a maker pool for resting liquidity within 25 bps of the mid price (80% of it for orders within 5 bps, 15% for 6–10 bps, 5% for 11–25 bps), a taker pool that, like today's program, rewards volume and open interest, and a trading-activity bonus pool whose first week rewards spot trading of the OpenAI Private Markets Note (OPAIPon). It runs through the end of 2026 and, per the post, continues after that unless Ondo says otherwise. Pool sizes had not been published on October 22, 2026; we will add them once the Rewards page shows them.

Ondo Points come from the Ondo Foundation: a fixed 5,000,000 points per week, split by trading activity ("higher volume and OI increases your share") and credited shortly after each week ends. The leaderboard's top account had 15,601,099 points on October 22, 2026. There is no published conversion into ONDO or any other token, so treat points as an unpriced bonus, not income. Points are not available in the US, Panama or other non-eligible jurisdictions.

Short campaigns. Ondo runs time-limited offers on top: a $20 Win-Win referral boost (September 15–30, ended), a spot-trading mission (October 6–13, ended), a fee rebate for new crypto-perp traders (October 13–20, ended) and the Token2049 referral boost (to November 6, 2026 (12:00 UTC), below). Incentives explain part of today's volume; do not trade more than you would anyway to chase them.

How to use Ondo Perps: sign up, fund and trade in 5 steps

Ondo Perps referral code AGHSGT: 5% off fees

Our Ondo Perps referral code is AGHSGT. The standard program, as shown on the app's Referrals page on October 22, 2026: anyone who signs up with a code gets a 5% discount on trading fees "for the duration of the program", and the referrer earns 10% of those fees, credited automatically. Opening the app through our link passes the code along.

Token2049 Referral Boost (October 6 to November 6, 2026 (12:00 UTC)). Referrers who register or sign in through the campaign link (app.ondoperps.xyz/t2049) are upgraded to a tier where they earn 30% of their friends' fees and the friends get a 20% fee rebate, credited on a rolling basis; an invite-only MAX tier pays more. It applies only to referrers who opened that link, not to every code. Our code AGHSGT is not on the campaign tier (we did not join the campaign), so signing up with it gives the standard 5%; the Referrals page shows your rate after you apply a code.

Beware of bigger promises. Pages ranking for "Ondo Perps referral code" list many competing codes. Outside time-limited campaigns like the one above, every valid code gives the same 5%; no code changes the base or promo fee rate itself.

What we earn: at the promo rate, a referee trading $250,000 a month as taker pays about $59 in fees after the 5% discount, so our 10% is about $6 a month. It comes out of Ondo's fee revenue, not on top of your fees.

Start small. The platform is in public beta: try a liquid market such as gold or the Nasdaq 100 first.

Ondo Perps markets and leverage

The API listed 87 perp contracts on November 3, 2026, 76 of them enabled: 47 single stocks, 7 ETFs, 6 commodities, 2 indices, 2 FX pairs, 11 crypto assets and 1 pre-IPO market. Leverage is set per market up to a maximum, all under cross margin:

From api.ondoperps.xyz/v1/markets (marginInfo), fetched November 3, 2026 at 12:30 UTC when this page was built; each market has a single $1M position bracket. The docs' leverage page still shows an older table (20x maximum, NVDA 10x); the API is what the exchange enforces.

Weekends and holidays. Stock and index perps keep trading 24/7. During US market hours the oracle uses external feeds; on weekends (Friday 8:00 PM ET to Sunday 8:00 PM ET) and US holidays the price switches to an internal oracle driven by Ondo Perps' own order book, smoothed over time. Collateral is marked continuously and liquidations keep running. Expect gaps at Monday's open to be settled against that internal price: the core risk of any 24/7 stock perp.

Spot trading, Private Markets and the OpenAI pre-IPO perp

• Spot (since September 28, 2026). Buy and sell Ondo tokenized stocks against USDC on a central limit order book in the same account, which makes a cash-and-carry trade (long the token, short the perp) possible on one platform. Spot was fee-free until October 28, 2026; check the ticket for the current spot rate.
• Private Markets (October 8, 2026). The OpenAI Private Markets Note (OPAIPon) trades as spot at 0.25% maker / 0.5% taker. It is a note issued by a separate company, for non-US persons only, and it does not count as perps collateral.
• OPENAI-USD.P (October 21, 2026). A pre-IPO perp on OpenAI with up to 3x leverage, an open-interest cap and almost no funding (multiplier 0.005). It tracks a price discovered on Ondo Perps itself, not a listed share.

Ondo Perps volume: gold leads

Live: in the 24 hours to 12:30 UTC on Tuesday, November 3, 2026, the public contracts endpoint summed to $354.1M of volume and $108.4M of open interest across 76 markets (refreshed on every site build).

api.ondoperps.xyz/v1/perps/contracts (usdVolume), one Thursday reading of $365.5M for the whole venue; volumes move with incentives and the US market calendar.

Volume swings with the calendar. The same endpoint summed to $142.6M on Thursday, September 24, 2026 and only $24.8M on Saturday, September 26, when stock and index markets ran on the internal oracle. Outside gold, the indices, BTC and a few large stocks, most single-stock perps trade a few million dollars a day or less, so use limit orders on anything else.

Tokenized stocks as collateral

USDC is accepted on Ethereum and Arbitrum; Ondo tokenized stocks on Ethereum only. 12 tokens qualify as of October 22, 2026: SPYon, QQQon, NVDAon, GOOGLon, TSLAon, MUon, SNDKon, DRAMon, SPCXon, CRCLon, GLDon and SLVon. Each carries a haircut and a cap on how much counts toward margin: SPYon and QQQon 10%, GOOGLon, MUon, SNDKon and DRAMon 15%, TSLAon 17%, NVDAon, SPCXon and CRCLon 25%, GLDon 6.5% and SLVon 9% (full table). The haircut only reduces margin credit; you withdraw the same tokens. Losses are covered by borrowing USDC against the stock ("USDC Debt"), limited in the beta to 30% of your non-USDC margin value and $100,000 per account; hitting the limit triggers Auto-Exchange, which sells just enough collateral to repay it. A stock-collateral account can therefore be liquidated by a fall in the collateral as well as in the position. The app footer showed $33.6M of tokenized-stock collateral on deposit on October 22, 2026.

What traders use it for

• Hedging stocks without selling them. Deposit NVDAon or SPYon, keep the shares' upside, and short the matching perp over an earnings release or a weekend.
• The gold and silver basis trade. Post GLDon or SLVon (or buy them on spot) and short the gold or silver perp. You are market-neutral and collect funding while it is positive: about 0.000625% an hour at zero premium after the 0.5x multiplier. The risks are funding turning negative, the collateral haircut and the weekend 2.5% Auto-Exchange fee.
• Trading indices and gold outside market hours. US100, US500, gold and oil trade through weekends and US holidays, priced by the internal oracle.

Is Ondo Perps safe? How custody works

Ondo Perps calls itself a "decentralized offchain exchange". In practice, per its technology and architecture pages:

• Matching, margin, liquidations and wallet logic run inside Intel SGX secure enclaves, encrypted even from the host and from Ondo's operators.
• An independent attestor network checks that the enclave runs the published code on genuine hardware, holds split key shares so no single party can move funds, and must approve code upgrades.
• Deposits go to a unique funding address and are then swept into an operational hot wallet; withdrawals are paid from it on-chain. Trades and balances are off-chain records.

So your funds are not in a smart contract you control, and your positions are not on a public chain. The design is closer to a centralized exchange with hardware-backed integrity guarantees than to Hyperliquid (own L1) or Lighter (zk-rollup). Ondo Perps has run a public bug bounty on Cantina since June 2, 2026, with maximum rewards of $1.5M for a critical finding, $100,000 for high, $20,000 for medium and $1,000 for low. A bounty is not an audit or an insurance policy. Size your balance accordingly.

Ondo Perps API and trading bots

API key creation has been on for every account since July 2026. During the public beta the default limit is 1 request per second; the docs say higher limits are available by emailing support with your account ID and use case. The API reference covers orders (limit, market, batched orders, cancel-all), positions, deposits and withdrawals, IP whitelisting per key, Sign-In with Ethereum authentication and a sandbox environment. Public market data (the contracts and markets endpoints this page reads) needs no key. Third-party front-ends can add a builder fee of up to 10 bps on top of the normal fee, so check the fee line if you trade through an app.

Ondo Perps vs Hyperliquid, edgeX and Lighter for stock perps

Ondo and Hyperliquid columns: api.ondoperps.xyz and api.hyperliquid.xyz metaAndAssetCtxs (dex=xyz), read in the same minute on October 22, 2026. Growth mode cuts HIP-3 fees by at least 90% and is set per market by the deployer; gold, MSTR, BMNR and STRC were not in growth mode. edgeX leverage from its public metadata API (displayMaxLeverage) on October 22, 2026.

On fees, Hyperliquid is cheaper for stocks and indices. Almost every trade.xyz market runs in growth mode, so a $10,000 NVDA taker round trip costs about $1.80 on Hyperliquid against $5.00 on Ondo at the promo rate, and the xyz books traded about 9.4 times Ondo's total volume on October 22, 2026. Ondo undercuts Hyperliquid on markets without growth mode, and gold is the one that matters: 0.025% vs 0.090% taker, and Ondo traded $155.4M of gold against $45M on xyz:GOLD that day. It also undercuts edgeX's 0.045% everywhere while the promo lasts; Lighter's free Standard tier is cheaper still. See trade.xyz: stocks on Hyperliquid for the full xyz fee and market list, or the NVDA perp on Hyperliquid and gold perp pages.

Where Ondo Perps still wins: it is the only one of the four that lets you keep tokenized stocks as margin, it is cheaper and busier for gold, and it lists a few markets xyz does not (Take-Two, and SPY / QQQ as ETF perps next to the index perps). For crypto perps, Hyperliquid remains the venue with the depth; see our Hyperliquid review, edgeX review and Lighter review.

Risks and limits

• Custody and operator risk. Funds sit in a hot wallet governed by enclaves and attestors, and trading records are off-chain. The attestor design limits abuse; it does not make the venue trustless.
• Public beta. "Reduced risk parameters", a $1M position cap per market, a $100,000 USDC-debt cap and frequent updates with possible maintenance downtime.
• Weekend pricing. From Friday 8:00 PM ET to Sunday 8:00 PM ET the price comes from Ondo Perps' own order book. A Monday gap can liquidate positions that looked safe on Sunday.
• Collateral risk. With stock collateral, a drop in the stock raises your margin ratio even if your perp position is flat; weekend Auto-Exchange costs 2.5%.
• Carry cost. At zero premium, holding a long costs about 5.5% a year on stock, index and gold perps and about 10.9% on crypto perps.
• Promotions end. Fees double when the 50%-off promo ends; spot trading was fee-free only until October 28, 2026; points have no guaranteed value.
• Jurisdiction. Not for US persons or the other listed territories; the Terms also exclude any country where the service would need a licence.

Ondo Perps timeline

Sources: ondoperps.xyz/blog, the app's announcements, docs.ondoperps.xyz/changelog, the Cantina bounty page and the official @OndoPerps X account, read October 22, 2026; the last row from api.ondoperps.xyz, read November 3, 2026 (fetched when this page is built).

Frequently asked questions

Related: all exchange reviews · edgeX review (stock perps) · Hyperliquid review · stock perps on Hyperliquid (trade.xyz) · gold perps guide · Hyperliquid fees · Hyperliquid referral code HOLYGRAIL · perp DEX ranking · Polymarket Perps vs Hyperliquid.

Disclosure: we earn a commission when you sign up through links on this page; it does not raise your fees. Links to Ondo Perps use our referral code AGHSGT (we receive 10% of the trading fees of accounts that join with it under the standard program) and links to Hyperliquid use our referral code HOLYGRAIL. Ondo Perps figures were read from its official docs, public API and app on September 24, 2026 and re-checked October 22, 2026; volumes are snapshots and promotions change. Perpetual futures are high-risk instruments.