Ostium raises $20 million in Series A... General Catalyst · Jump Trading co-led

Ostium, a global derivatives platform bridging decentralized finance (DeFi) and traditional finance, officially announced on the 4th that it raised $20 million in a Series A round.

The round was co-led by General Catalyst and Jump Trading, with participation from Coinbase, Wintermute Ventures, and GSR. The total capital influx, including seed funding, is $24 million.

Ostium aims to build next-generation on-chain trading infrastructure to replace the traditional finance contracts for difference (CFD) market. The existing CFD industry has repeatedly faced issues of opaque pricing structures and conflicts of interest between centralized brokers and customers. Ostium presents a structure that implements this transparently on a blockchain.

Its core technology is an RFQ (request for quote)-based perpetual swaps model that directly references liquidity from physical markets. It is characterized by its ability to provide deep liquidity and a low-cost structure on-chain for physical asset–based instruments such as equities, foreign exchange, and commodities. Ostium stated, "Currently 80~95% of the platform's total trading volume is based on real-world assets(RWA)," and explained, "In particular, during this fall's gold(gold) price surge, it accounted for more than half of on-chain open interest(OI)."

The company plans to significantly expand the asset classes it supports using the new investment. It aims to broaden its coverage to soft commodities, the South Korean won, interest rates, and rare-earth–related instruments, and to strengthen global market accessibility to build an environment where a single wallet can trade a variety of real-world assets.

An Ostium representative said, "The traditional CFD market, which trades more than $10 trillion monthly, is large in scale but has been criticized for structural opacity," and added, "Ostium is building a platform that can replace this with an on-chain approach." He went on, "This funding round is a sign that Ostium's role as infrastructure connecting global real-world asset markets on-chain is being strengthened."