Ostium Labs, Co., landed fresh attention this week after announcing $24 million in new funding that positions it squarely at the center of one of the most interesting shifts in market infrastructure. The company behind the Ostium protocol—an onchain perpetuals platform built entirely on blockchain rails—secured a $20 million Series A co-led by General Catalyst and Jump Crypto, paired with an earlier unannounced $4 million strategic round, bringing its total funding to $27.8 million.

The appeal of what Ostium is building becomes obvious once you look at the outdated machinery it’s trying to replace. Traditional CFD brokers operate inside opaque, discretionary systems that decide everything from pricing to liquidations, often without clarity or auditability. Ostium’s founders, Harvard classmates Kaledora and Marco, went after this structural flaw directly. Their protocol shifts global markets trading into a self-custodial blockchain environment where every spread, quote, and liquidity parameter is transparent. Instead of trusting a broker’s internal logic, all execution is enforced by smart contracts, with capital staying in segregated onchain vaults.

That clarity has turned into real traction. Ostium has already processed $25 billion in cumulative volume, including $5 billion in metals alone, and something unusual is happening on the platform: traditional markets dominate. More than 95% of open interest comes from Real World Assets like metals, FX, and equities. During the recent gold rally, Ostium captured more than half of all onchain gold perpetuals open interest, helped by its ability to quote predictable holding costs and allow large-position exposure without the friction of custodial brokerage systems.

Kaledora Kiernan-Linn, the company’s CEO, noted that their earliest product-market fit came from crypto-native traders who wanted exposure to global markets without moving capital into broker-run infrastructures. The broader ambition is to challenge the massive CFD market—roughly $10 trillion in monthly volume—using blockchain transparency as the foundation rather than trying to recreate old systems on new rails.

General Catalyst’s Marc Bhargava pointed to that exact shift, saying Ostium is building transparent and resilient infrastructure that finally makes traditional assets trackable and tradeable onchain in a verifiable way. Jump Crypto’s Saurabh Sharma emphasized how most new perpetuals platforms try to rebuild exchanges from scratch, while Ostium simply taps into the real liquidity that already drives global equities, commodities, and FX markets offchain. It competes with brokers, not exchanges, using blockchain to make the entire process more neutral and auditable.

The investor lineup includes Balaji Srinivasan, Localglobe, SIG, Crucible Capital, GSR, Nick Van Eck, Shiliang Tang, and angels from Bridgewater, Two Sigma, and Brevan Howard—people deeply familiar with both market structure and blockchain infrastructure.

With this new Series A, Ostium plans to expand asset coverage, harden its infrastructure for growing trading volumes, and push further into the space where blockchain is beginning to replace legacy brokerage plumbing. If momentum continues, it could mark a meaningful realignment in how global markets are accessed: transparent, verifiable, and built onchain from the start.