Ostium Raises $24 Million Series A to Bring Traditional Markets Onchain and Expand DeFi Perpetual Trading

Ostium, the decentralized finance (DeFi) and onchain trading startup co‑founded by Harvard alumni Kaledora Kiernan‑Linn and Marco Antonio Ribeiro, has secured a significant capital injection to accelerate its mission of bringing traditional global markets onto blockchain infrastructure for permissionless perpetual trading. In December 2025, the company announced it had raised $24 million in new funding, including a $20 million Series A round, bringing its total disclosed capital to $27.8 million and positioning it for continued growth in the emerging real‑world asset (RWA) DeFi sector.

The Series A round was co‑led by General Catalyst and Jump Crypto, two prominent investors with strong track records in backing infrastructure‑oriented technology companies. General Catalyst’s participation underscores its belief in Ostium’s approach to democratizing access to a wide array of global markets through transparent, self‑custodial blockchain protocols, while Jump Crypto’s involvement reflects continued institutional support for DeFi innovation and next‑generation derivatives platforms.

In addition to the lead investors, the funding round included participation from several high‑profile venture and strategic backers. These include Coinbase Ventures, Wintermute Ventures, Crucible Capital, LocalGlobe, Susquehanna International Group (SIG), GSR, and individual investors such as Balaji Srinivasan, Nick Van Eck, and Shiliang Tang, as well as angels from large hedge funds and trading firms like Bridgewater, Two Sigma, and Brevan Howard. This diverse group of backers highlights investor confidence in the company’s strategic direction at the intersection of decentralized finance and traditional asset exposure.

Ostium’s platform enables peer‑to‑peer trading of perpetual swaps tied to global equities, commodities, foreign exchange (FX), and indices directly from self‑custodial wallets — a notable expansion from traditional crypto‑native perpetual markets. Built on Arbitrum, an Ethereum Layer 2 network, Ostium sources pricing from existing deep pools of off‑chain liquidity, aiming to deliver institutional‑grade execution and transparent pricing without replicating fragmented exchange infrastructure onchain.

The company reports robust traction, with more than $25 billion in cumulative trading volume processed to date, including $5 billion in metals trading alone. Ostium also says that over 95 % of its open interest is in traditional markets, demonstrating early demand for blockchain‑based access to real‑world asset exposure. During recent market moves, such as the gold rally, Ostium captured more than half of all onchain perpetual open interest for gold — a milestone that underscores its foothold in the budding RWA perpetuals niche.

The $4 million portion of the funding round that was previously unannounced reflects strategic capital raised before the Series A, contributing to the company’s total disclosed funding. Ostium’s valuation after the round is reported to be around $250 million, a sign of strong investor belief in its potential to disrupt traditional broker‑controlled trading infrastructure by offering transparent, auditable markets that don’t require custodial control of user assets.

Founders Kiernan‑Linn and Ribeiro conceived Ostium with the idea of addressing structural issues in global retail trading, where most exposure to stocks, FX, and other traditional markets still runs through centralized brokers with discretionary controls over pricing and withdrawal policies. Ostium’s model replaces this legacy setup with smart contracts and permissionless execution, enabling traders to retain control of their capital while accessing broad market exposure.

The new funding will be used to expand Ostium’s asset class coverage, scale its infrastructure to handle growing user demand and trading volume, enhance liquidity partnerships, and continue evolving its pricing and execution mechanisms. As institutional and individual traders increasingly explore onchain alternatives to brokered access, Ostium’s funding round signals growing momentum for decentralized perpetual protocols that bridge crypto innovation with traditional finance.

Ostium’s investor roster and expanding capitalization also reflect broader trends in the crypto and DeFi investment landscape, where infrastructure projects — particularly those focused on derivatives, tokenization, and real‑world asset integration — continue to draw attention from both traditional venture firms and strategic crypto‑native funds. With a diverse group of backers behind it, Ostium is well‑positioned to drive further innovation in onchain market access and challenge conventional models of trading execution and liquidity provision.