Ostium Labs, the developer of the Ostium protocol, announced the launch of the first real-time decentralized execution layer. This novel infrastructure hedges directional flows with a network of institutional participants active in the world’s most liquid traditional markets, including Jump, which serves as a hedging partner alongside prime brokers and other major institutions.
To date, Ostium has processed over $50 billion in cumulative volume and generated nearly $35 million in protocol revenue across more than 26,000 traders and close to one million trades. Today’s upgrade establishes Ostium as the first decentralized execution layer, a transparent and self-custodial alternative to the opaque $10 trillion monthly volume CFD market.
Historically, decentralized perpetual platforms have been built as exchanges, with each platform rebuilding orderbook liquidity from the ground up on each offered asset. Ostium takes a different approach, with pricing leveraging traditional market venues and participants. As a result, Ostium is able to access some of the most liquid pricing for most major markets, bringing institutional-grade execution onchain.
Prior to today’s upgrade, Ostium’s public liquidity pool both settled trades and absorbed all net directional exposures. That model served Ostium’s 26,000+ traders well, but limited execution quality and scale for the next stage of growth. The new architecture sets the stage for drastically improved capital efficiency and trade execution. Users globally can gain exposure to traditional assets across commodities, stocks, ETFs, indices, and FX with full self-custody and instant settlement. The public liquidity pool’s role now changes fundamentally: a separate capital pool programmatically hedges net exposures offchain through a network of institutional partners. It settles once daily with a buffer layer sitting atop the public liquidity pool, which now acts as an intraday lending layer. This enables the protocol to dramatically scale open interest and more closely match the depth of underlying markets.
“Programmatically hedging onchain flow with traditional market participants required building a new kind of infrastructure, a translation layer between smart contracts and institutional-grade messaging protocols, with sub-100-millisecond latency across every step. Fifteen of our twenty engineers worked on this for four months. It’s the first time this has been done.”
— Marco Antonio Ribeiro, Co-founder and CTO, Ostium Labs
What this unlocks
By referencing real-time depth of offchain traditional markets and taking into account global liquidity sources, Ostium’s allowable open interest now scales dynamically across most major assets, removing the constraints of static caps. Execution quality can now scale to that of major global venues, compressing execution costs and introducing rollover fees that reflect the true carry cost of the underlying assets for the first time.
Unlike traditional brokers and CFDs, users retain full custody over their funds. Every trade is transparently verifiable onchain and settlement is instant. Traders globally can now gain exposure to the world’s most liquid assets across stocks, commodities, indices, ETFs, and FX from a digital wallet.
“Just as stablecoins extended the reach of the U.S. dollar, Ostium extends the reach of the world’s most liquid global markets to anyone with a wallet. Stablecoins took a product with clear global demand – the dollar – and made it instantly accessible, programmable, and transparent. Ostium does the same for trading global markets.”
— Kaledora Kiernan-Linn, Co-founder and CEO, Ostium Labs
Availability
The upgrade is live today. Traders can access stocks, commodities, indices, and FX from a self-custodial wallet at www.app.ostium.com.