Ostium Labs has landed a $20 million Series A funding round led by Jump Crypto and General Catalyst. Other investors include Wintermute Ventures, Coinbase Ventures and Crucible Capital. While not included in the current round, it mentions another market maker, GSR, as an existing investor. The company developed the Ostium Protocol, which provides self-custodial perpetual futures for commodities, foreign exchange, stocks and crypto, but the vast majority of activity relates to real world assets (RWA).
Ostium claims to have supported $25 billion in cumulative volume, including $5 billion in metal trading. Open interest on the protocol is a more modest $159 million, with the top open contracts for Gold, Silver, EUR/USD, Copper and the Nasdaq 100, in that order.
“Since Ostium’s earliest days, our thesis has been that the global CFD (contracts for difference) broker market will be disrupted by DeFi,” said Kaledora Kiernan-Linn, co-founder and CEO of Ostium. In a statement, Ostium Labs criticized CFD brokers and spread betting platforms, implying that they impose hidden fees or freeze accounts when a position becomes too profitable.
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