Ostium

Ostium Labs is a financial technology company developing a decentralized perpetuals exchange for Real World Assets (RWAs). Founded in 2022 by Kaledora Kiernan-Linn and Marco Antonio Ribeiro, the company is positioning itself to bridge the gap between traditional financial markets and decentralized finance (DeFi). The founders' paths crossed at Harvard, and they both later worked at Bridgewater Associates. Their shared experience trading across both DeFi and traditional markets highlighted the friction and inefficiencies of managing on-chain and off-chain assets, which became the foundational problem Ostium seeks to solve. Kiernan-Linn has a background as a professional ballerina with the Royal Danish Ballet, while Ribeiro is an International Physics and Math Olympiad medalist.

The company's core product is the Ostium Protocol, a decentralized exchange built on Arbitrum, an Ethereum Layer 2 network. It enables traders to gain on-chain, leveraged price exposure to a variety of off-chain assets—such as commodities, forex, and indices—without requiring the direct tokenization of these assets. Instead, the platform utilizes synthetic perpetual contracts that track the prices of these real-world assets via oracle price feeds. This model allows for a non-custodial and permissionless trading environment where users retain full self-custody of their funds. The platform targets both crypto-native traders familiar with perpetual futures and traditional traders seeking more transparent and flexible alternatives to conventional derivatives platforms. By using a pool-based liquidity model, where liquidity providers take the other side of traders' positions, Ostium aims to provide an efficient structure for leveraged trading of assets like gold, oil, and currency pairs.

In October 2023, Ostium Labs announced it had raised $3.5 million in a seed funding round. The round was co-led by General Catalyst and LocalGlobe, with participation from notable investors including Susquehanna International Group (SIG), DeFi Alliance, and former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan. This capital is intended to support the mainnet deployment of the Ostium Protocol, grow the development team, and fund rigorous smart contract audits. The company launched its public mainnet in October 2024, offering real-time trading on assets like Gold, Copper, and Oil to any user with a crypto wallet. Ostium's business model is centered on facilitating trades within its protocol, likely generating revenue through trading fees and other protocol-related activities. The company has also introduced a points program to incentivize user activity, which may indicate a future token airdrop.

Keywords: Real World Assets, RWA, perpetuals exchange, decentralized finance, DeFi, on-chain trading, Arbitrum, synthetic perpetuals, crypto trading, financial derivatives, commodities trading, forex trading, blockchain finance, asset tokenization, Kaledora Kiernan-Linn, Marco Antonio Ribeiro, General Catalyst, LocalGlobe, non-custodial exchange, leveraged trading, oracle network, liquidity pool, financial protocol