NEW YORK — Ostium Labs, the developer of a protocol enabling decentralized trading of perpetual swaps on traditional markets, announced Thursday it raised $24 million in new funding.
The funding includes a $20 million Series A round co-led by General Catalyst and Jump Crypto, and a previously unannounced $4 million strategic round. It brings the company’s total funding to $27.8 million.
Ostium’s protocol allows for peer-to-peer, onchain trading of perpetual swap contracts for assets like commodities, indices, stocks and currencies, a segment of finance traditionally dominated by centralized brokers. The company said it has processed $25 billion in cumulative trading volume to date.
Founded by Harvard alumni Kaledora Kiernan-Linn and Marco, Ostium aims to use decentralized finance, or DeFi, infrastructure to challenge the existing market for contracts for difference, a type of derivative. The company argues its onchain model offers greater transparency and allows traders to maintain control of their assets in self-custodial wallets, unlike traditional brokerage systems.
“Since Ostium’s earliest days, our thesis has been that the global CFD broker market will be disrupted by DeFi,” said Kiernan-Linn, who is also CEO. “Our ambition is to build the platform to make that possible.”
The platform is built on Arbitrum, an Ethereum layer-2 network. Ostium said more than 95% of its open interest is in traditional asset markets, not cryptocurrencies. It reported capturing over half of the total onchain gold open interest during recent market rallies.
“Ostium is building transparent and resilient infrastructure poised to disrupt the $10T monthly-volume global CFD market,” said Marc Bhargava, managing director at General Catalyst.
Investors in the new round also include Balaji Srinivasan, Susquehanna International Group and Crucible Capital, among others. Existing backers include Coinbase Ventures and Wintermute Ventures.
The company said it will use the Series A capital to expand its asset coverage, scale its infrastructure and develop its trading platform.
Ostium is based in New York.