Ostium Lands $20M Series A to Supercharge Onchain Perpetual Swaps for Traditional Markets

Another nine-figure crypto round hits the tape—this time for a team betting Wall Street's future trades onchain.

Ostium just secured a $20 million war chest. The target? Building perpetual swaps for real-world assets—think oil, forex, and indices—directly on the blockchain. No brokers. No traditional clearinghouses. Just code and collateral.

Why TradFi's Toys Are Going Onchain

Perpetual swaps are the lifeblood of crypto derivatives. They let traders speculate on price movements without ever owning the underlying asset. Ostium's play is simple: take that wildly popular, 24/7 model and point it at markets a hundred times larger.

Imagine betting on the price of Brent crude or the EUR/USD pair with the same leverage and liquidity you'd find on a top crypto DEX. That's the endgame. It bypasses the entire legacy infrastructure—a system still reliant on fax machines in some dark corners—and replaces it with smart contracts.

The $20 Million Question: Liquidity

Funding is one thing. Building deep, reliable liquidity pools for volatile commodities is another. That's where the Series A capital gets tactical. It's for oracle integrations, risk engine development, and, most critically, seeding those initial markets to attract the big fish.

The pitch to institutional players? Lower counterparty risk, transparent settlement, and global access. The catch? Convincing them to trust a smart contract over a century-old bank with a fancy logo.

A Cynical Nod to the Old Guard

Let's be real—this is a direct shot across the bow of the prime brokerage cabal. Their fat spreads and opaque fees have been a protected revenue stream for decades. Onchain perpetuals don't just compete; they threaten to make that whole intermediary layer look like a very expensive, very slow bug.

Ostium's raise signals that investor appetite isn't just for the next meme coin. It's for rebuilding the foundational plumbing of finance itself. Whether traditional traders will ditch their Bloomberg terminals for a crypto wallet remains the billion-dollar bet. But with $20 million fresh on the balance sheet, Ostium is buying the shovels to start digging.

Ostium Labs has raised $20 million in a Series A funding round co-led by General Catalyst and Jump Crypto, the company announced today. Combined with a previously undisclosed $4 million strategic round, Ostium's total funding now stands at $27.8 million.

The platform enables decentralized trading of perpetual swaps tied to traditional assets including equities, commodities, indices, and foreign exchange markets—offering traders exposure to conventional financial instruments while maintaining self-custody of their capital through blockchain-based infrastructure.

The new capital will fund expansion of asset class coverage, infrastructure scaling to accommodate growing trading volumes, and continued development of the platform's transparency and efficiency features.

Built on Arbitrum, an Ethereum layer-2 network, Ostium has processed $25 billion in cumulative trading volume since launch, including $5 billion in metals trading alone. The protocol distinguishes itself by concentrating primarily on real-world assets, with over 95% of its open interest tied to traditional markets rather than cryptocurrency assets.

Co-founders Kaledora Kiernan-Linn and Marco Ribeiro, former Harvard classmates, developed Ostium to challenge the centralized broker model that dominates retail trading of contracts for difference (CFDs). The platform uses quote-based pricing sourced from existing institutional liquidity venues, allowing transparent execution without constructing a separate onchain exchange layer.

"Our thesis has been that the global CFD broker market will be disrupted by DeFi," said Kiernan-Linn, Ostium's CEO. "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."

During recent Gold price rallies, Ostium said it captured more than 50% of total onchain gold open interest, positioning itself as the primary platform for traders seeking size and predictable holding costs in precious metals perpetuals.

Marc Bhargava, managing director at General Catalyst, said the company is targeting the $10 trillion monthly-volume global CFD market with transparent infrastructure. Saurabh Sharma, Chief Investment Officer at Jump Crypto, noted that Ostium differentiates itself by sourcing quotes directly from established liquidity venues rather than attempting to rebuild markets onchain.

Previous investors include Balaji Srinivasan, Localglobe, Susquehanna International Group, Crucible Capital, GSR, and angel investors from Bridgewater, Two Sigma, and Brevan Howard.

The new capital will fund expansion of asset class coverage, infrastructure scaling to accommodate growing trading volumes, and continued development of the platform's transparency and efficiency features.