Ostium Labs has raised $24 million, which includes $20 million Series A led by Catalyst and Jump Crypto, plus a previously unannounced $4 million strategic round. The total raised to date is set at $27.8 million.
Existing investors include Balaji Srinivasan, Localglobe, Susquehanna International Group (SIG), Crucible Capital, GSR, Nick Van Eck, Shiliang Tang, and angels from Bridgewater, Two Sigma, and Brevan Howard.
Ostiam is a firm that aims to bring traditional trading onchain in a peer-to-peer method. The company reports $25 billion in total trading volume so far, including $5 billion in metals trading.
Ostium says its self-custodial architecture ensures that trader capital remains in segregated smart contracts. Performance is said to be instantaneous for settlement. The service is built on Arbitrum, a layer 2 Ethereum protocol.
Ostium claims to be the first perpetuals protocol with a majority of activity concentrated in Real World Assets — over 95% of open interest is in traditional markets.
During the ongoing gold rally, Ostium says it captured over 50% of total onchain gold open interest as the only perps platform where traders can access the move in size with predictable holding costs.
Kaledora Kiernan-Linn and Marco Antonio Ribiero founded Ostium. The two state that while crypto perpetuals have shown that markets can operate with verifiable execution and self-custody, this model has remained largely limited to crypto assets. Ostium seeks to replace legacy infrastructure with a permissionless.
Kiernan-Linn, CEO of Ostium, says:
“Our first clear product-market fit came from crypto-native traders who wanted exposure to traditional assets without moving their capital into custodial broker infrastructure. The next arc of growth is about disrupting this legacy market with transparent execution and self-custody. This investment from strategic investors like Jump Crypto will enable us to scale access to these deep global markets on blockchain rails, all while leveraging pricing from the original liquidity venues without building a fragmented exchange layer onchain.”