Bondi x Surgence: Why Corporate Bonds Belong Onchain

Akin Kadioglu and Ali Sarp, co-founders of Bondi Finance, joined Surgence for a live broadcast on X. Watch the replay here.

Corporate bonds sound boring until you look at the numbers. That's where the conversation started, and it's the idea behind everything we're building at Bondi. Here are the main takeaways for anyone who missed it.

From a friends-and-family portfolio to DeFi

We didn't come to Bondi from a bond desk. Before it, we were managing a friends and family portfolio, and a lot of our time went into corporate bonds. For a stretch, blue-chip Turkish companies were paying roughly 15 to 17 percent in dollars. Meanwhile, on the side, we were farming yields in DeFi, where everyone was chasing similar returns and inventing ever more complicated ways to get them.

At some point those two worlds started talking to each other. One side had real companies paying real interest. The other had millions of people looking for yield, with no way into that market. Bondi came out of that gap.

A market that stayed closed

Most people have never bought a corporate bond, and for good reason. Most bonds still trade over the counter, pricing is opaque, and you often don't know what commission you paid until afterward. The bigger barrier is size: the smallest piece of a corporate bond you can normally buy is $100,000 or more.

That's why this market has been closed to almost everyone outside institutions, even though it's enormous.

The overlooked corner of the market

The part we're most excited about is dollar bonds issued by companies outside the US. Our view is that these pay meaningfully more than US bonds at the same credit rating, and that they've historically defaulted less often. It's a roughly seven-trillion-dollar market that most people can't touch.

The usual question for any yield in crypto is how long it lasts. Our answer is different, because we're not generating yield with a clever model. We're sourcing it from real interest payments by real companies, the kind that exist whether or not crypto is having a good year. So the limit isn't whether a mechanism holds up. It's how much of this supply exists, and there is far more of it than the tokenized asset market can currently absorb.

$100 pieces, and fractions of that

A corporate bond is a loan to a company. You lend, they pay interest along the way, and they return the principal at the end. Bondi takes bonds that already trade in public markets and turns them into tokens you can hold in a wallet.

One Bondi Bond Token represents $100 of the underlying bond, and you can hold a fraction of one.

• Each token is backed 1:1 by real bonds held in regulated custody, inside a bankruptcy-remote structure.
• Tokens are issued under a Class F license from the Bermuda Monetary Authority, through a segregated account kept separate from the issuer's balance sheet.
• We publish Proof-of-Reserve documents and contract addresses for every token, and Sherlock audits the contracts.
• Bondi runs on Ethereum, Base, Mantle, and Plume.

Interest is paid in stablecoins to verified wallets. If your wallet isn't verified, you receive transferable Coupon and Principal Tokens that a verified holder can redeem instead. Minting requires verification; trading the tokens onchain does not.

Four bonds, four different bets

We choose every bond ourselves, and the ones tokenized so far are deliberately different:

• A Singaporean logistics company at 10% annualized, which matured and paid out
• A Hong Kong retail operator at 15%, which matured in June
• Argentina's national energy company, still paying
• Intel's 2028 bond

Yields on bonds like these can range from around 4% to 40% depending on risk, so each one is its own decision. We talked about how we decide what's worth putting onchain, and why a household name like Intel and an emerging-market issuer belong on the same platform.

Institutions first, retail after

Most teams in this space would have kept pushing on retail. We deliberately went the other way: institutions first, serious capital on the platform, and retail afterward. Reaching retail is hard, and a platform with real depth and a track record serves those users better when they arrive.

It's a patient way to build. Two years in, we can talk about results rather than plans: the Singaporean logistics bond and the Hong Kong retail bond have both run their full course and paid out what they promised.

Where Bondi is going

Today, the two of us choose every bond. Where we're headed is a different business: becoming an onchain bond broker, the place people go to build exposure to bonds, rather than only the people picking them.

Our upcoming basket bond tokens, integrated with Morpho for looping, are a good example. They're a showcase, curated by us, of what can be done with Bondi once bonds can be composed with the rest of onchain finance.

Get started

If you've never thought about bonds, this is a good time to start.

• Website: bondifinance.io
• X: @bondifinance
• Telegram: t.me/BondiFinanceTG
• Broadcast replay: watch on X
• More from the Surgence team: surgence.io

Thanks to the Surgence team for hosting us.

Bonds carry credit and default risk, and yields vary by issuer. Minting Bondi tokens requires wallet verification. Nothing here is investment advice.