Today, we’re thrilled to announce that we've raised an additional $24 million in new capital, including a $20 million Series A co-led by General Catalyst and Jump Crypto, along with Wintermute Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Crucible Capital, and an incredible set of angels. They will be key to actualizing our vision: democratizing access to the highest quality and most liquid global asset markets in the world.

We started Ostium with the vision of upending the legacy CFD (Contract-for-Difference) market, an idea that Marco and I first conceptualized trading on offshore brokers in a hacker house. These platforms happily let users like us take risky positions, but when those same positions moved against them, they’d swiftly exercise discretion over pricing, liquidations, and withdrawals. It took sending countless emails pushing brokers to honor their own terms to realize the system was broken.

Millions of traders around the world turn to CFD and spread betting platforms as their only gateway to U.S. stocks, commodities, and the most liquid global markets. These centralized brokers provide synthetic exposure to a wide range of traditional assets. But their opaque, centralized infrastructure means users can face re-quoting, hidden fees, and account freezes when trades turn unexpectedly profitable.

Building onchain and developing an onchain execution engine inherently enables transparency and self-custody. But crypto rails today often make fair pricing and deep liquidity harder, especially for longer-tail traditional assets. The result is that while many traders may think they are trading a multi-trillion dollar market like the gold market, they wind up in fact betting on an illiquid derivative thereof, subject to the often unreliable liquidity dynamics of the crypto markets.

From day one, our goal has been to fuse two core values into a single product:

1. The transparency and self-custody of crypto, and

2. The fair pricing and deep liquidity of traditional markets.

Those two north stars have shaped every architectural decision we’ve made since.

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Ostium’s Architecture

Our architectural choices follow directly from this vision. We opted for a single-quote RFQ model, not an orderbook exchange. Ostium quotes directly from a specialized oracle, enabling the protocol to price assets at the underlying market's price (or very close to it) and offer the closest thing onchain to the execution depth that a trader would get in the real markets.

To scale that model without compromise, Ostium is expanding its liquidity partnerships. The protocol will now be able to support dramatic increases in liquidity, open interest, and asset coverage, allowing us to expand into the most liquid markets in the world. This growth is supported by a core set of liquidity partners able to hedge flows across a diverse range of traditional assets while integrating directly with crypto rails.

Today, Ostium’s main hedging partner services the protocol by managing the bulk of these flows, hedging exposures when they exceed certain thresholds, and ensuring open interest doesn’t skew too heavily in a particular direction. That hedging capacity will be expanded materially with new liquidity integrations. There's also a new, comprehensive dashboard detailing the live and historical hedging positions on the protocol, allowing anyone to track the residual exposure OLP is taking on at any time. Check it out at https://ostiscan.xyz.

In the coming months, the Ostium protocol will evolve from a single-quote RFQ system into a competitive quoting environment, wherein makers will compete directly at the protocol level to quote and hedge large orders. Their participation will be gated and their economic alignment with the protocol ensured via an inbuilt native staking mechanism and slashing system.

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Points Program Updates

In line with this expansion, two changes to the points program to double down on our core focus:

1. CFD trader onboarding boost

If you’re a traditional CFD trader and want to Break Up With Your Broker to trade onchain, you’ll be eligible to receive a 2x boost on all points earned for the first 30 days from signup with Ostium. If this is you (or any of your friends), please fill out the form on Ostium’s landing page and forward broker affiliation to breakup@ostium.io. (Note: not available in U.S. / for U.S. traders)

2. TradFi boost

From now on, we will be increasing points program scores on all traditional assets - stocks, indices, FX, & commodities. This is the first and only trading venue in DeFi today with over 95% of open interest in traditional markets, and we will be doubling down on our core focus.

‍Finally: if you want to work with a brilliant team, we're hiring the very best across a variety of positions. We look for exceptional and spiky people. If this is you, join us: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/ostium