Ostium: Bringing Real-World Assets to DeFi Through Synthetic Perpetuals

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In recent years, global markets have gone through major changes. The pandemic, inflation, interest rate hikes, and geopolitical tensions have shifted the way people trade and invest. 

Retail traders are now more focused on macroeconomic events like CPI data and central bank policies. At the same time, there is growing interest in diversifying beyond traditional stock and bond portfolios, especially among younger investors.

These changes are also happening in crypto. Traders are starting to care more about real-world events. Onchain activity is growing, especially around non-crypto native assets like tokenized Treasurys and gold. 

But there’s still a mismatch: while most crypto platforms are built for active trading, real-world assets coming on-chain are mostly meant for long-term holding. This creates a clear gap in the market. Ostium aims to close that gap.

Instead of relying on order books or traditional AMMs, Ostium uses a pool-based model where liquidity providers take the other side of trader positions. This structure is more efficient for offering leverage and suits the nature of real-world assets, which often trade with lower volatility and follow market schedules.

In this report, we’ll look at the broader trends shaping both traditional and on-chain markets, explain the types of perpetuals being built today, and show why Ostium’s approach offers a practical way to bring real-world assets into the DeFi ecosystem.

Key Takeaways

• Ostium enables decentralized, leveraged trading of real-world assets like commodities, indices, and forex using synthetic perpetuals, without requiring asset tokenization.

• Its unique Shared Liquidity Layer, composed of a Liquidity Buffer and Market Making Vault, reduces risk exposure for LPs while maintaining capital efficiency for traders.

• Ostium integrates oracle and automation services from Stork, Chainlink, and Gelato, and has undergone multiple audits by Zellic, ThreeSigma, and Chaos Labs to ensure robustness.

• With over $3.58B in trading volume, 44,000+ trades, and $52.95M in TVL, Ostium is gaining strong traction as a DeFi-native alternative to traditional trading platforms.

• Backed by General Catalyst, LocalGlobe, and the Arbitrum Foundation, Ostium is accelerating growth through trading contests, feature development, and a live points program.

Ostium Team

Ostium Labs was co-founded by Kaledora Kiernan-Linn and Marco Antonio Ribeiro, who first met as classmates at Harvard. The idea for the company took shape while they were living together in a hacker house in Cambridge, where they began building the foundations of what would become the Ostium Protocol.

Before starting Ostium, Kaledora conducted research at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where she contributed to labs focused on sequencing analysis, viral vector development, and immunostaining. She also co-authored chapters in an epidemiology textbook.

Her background spans both science and finance, having interned at Bridgewater Associates with co-CIO Bob Prince, at McKinsey & Company in Berlin, and at Verdad Advisers, where she researched growth stock valuations under low interest rate environments.

• Kaledora also brings a unique creative edge to her career, having performed as a professional ballerina with the Royal Danish Ballet and Boston Ballet. 

• She choreographed original work in collaboration with institutions like the National Gallery of Denmark and the Bloom festival.

• She holds an A.B. in Neuroscience with a secondary in Statistics from Harvard University and previously earned the French Baccalaureate with highest honors from the Lycée Français de New York.

Before founding Ostium, Marco worked at Bridgewater Associates as an Investment Associate on the commodities team, where he focused on macro-driven strategies and global markets. He also co-founded the Harvard Entrepreneurship Society and served as President of the student-led economic research nonprofit, Erevna.

Marco studied Engineering Sciences and Economics at Harvard University and is currently on leave. He is based in London and works in a hybrid capacity.

What is Ostium

Ostium is a decentralized protocol that lets users trade synthetic perpetual contracts tied to real-world assets. It is built on Arbitrum, an Ethereum Layer 2 network, and uses oracles to track asset prices. This allows users to get exposure to things like gold, forex, and stock indices, without needing the assets to be tokenized first.

Unlike traditional exchanges, Ostium is fully on-chain and non-custodial. This means:

• You stay in control of your funds

• All trades happen through smart contracts

• Prices are powered by trusted oracle feeds

With Ostium, you can:

• Trade synthetic versions of real-world markets

• Earn rewards by depositing stablecoins and providing liquidity

• Join the community, share ideas, and help improve the product

Ostium is made up of several key parts:

• Ostium Protocol is the core set of smart contracts that power the trading experience

• Ostium Labs is the team building and maintaining the protocol

• Ostium Interface is the web platform users can use to interact with the protocol, though others can build their own interfaces too

• Ostium Governance is coming soon, with plans to let the community take a larger role in shaping how the platform evolves

In short, Ostium is building the infrastructure to let anyone trade real-world assets with the speed, transparency, and openness of crypto.

Ostium’s Key Features:

• Virtual Exposure, Not Tokenization: Traders don’t own the assets themselves but trade based on their price movements using synthetic perps. Prices are provided by fast oracle feeds (Stork Network for RWAs, Chainlink for crypto).
  

• Shared Liquidity Layer: Two capital pools support the system:
  

  • Liquidity Buffer: Handles PnL (profits and losses) across all traders.

  • Market Making Vault: LPs cover imbalances in long vs. short interest and absorb risk when the buffer is depleted.
    

• Dual Vault Risk Management: LPs take on temporary risk instead of impermanent loss. The protocol uses dynamic fees to limit their exposure and reward participation.
  

• Automated Trade Execution: Liquidations and limit orders are automated through Chainlink and Gelato, ensuring decentralized and predictable execution.
  

• Risk-Adjusted Fees:
  

  • Funding Fees: Increase with open interest (OI) imbalance to encourage market balance.

  • Volatility Fees: Scale with asset volatility to reflect risk from high leverage positions.

  • Conditional Opening Fees: Lower fees for counter-trades that reduce OI imbalance, higher for high-leverage or imbalance-increasing trades.

Ostium continues to gain momentum as a decentralized trading platform offering synthetic exposure to real-world assets. With growing user adoption and strong onchain activity, the following metrics highlight the current scale and performance of the protocol.

Trading Stats

• Total Volume Traded: $3.58B

• Total Number of Trades: 44,372

• Unique Traders: 4,658

• Cumulative Trading Fees Collected: $1.45M

Vault Stats

• Total Value Locked (TVL): $52.95M

• OLP Token Price: $1.0558

• Collateralization Ratio: 99.02%

• Annualized Vault Yield (APR): 20.95%

Core Product and Service Offering

Ostium is building tools to make on-chain trading simpler, faster, and more flexible. Its four main products give users different ways to interact with markets, earn yield, and automate strategies.

Trade

This is the core of the platform. Users can go long or short on real-world assets like stocks, commodities, indices, and currencies straight from their wallet. There's no signup, no middlemen, and no need to give up custody of your funds. You can trade with leverage, up to 200x, on assets like the S&P 500, Gold, and Oil.

Earn

Ostium lets you put your stablecoins to work by providing liquidity. When you deposit into the protocol’s liquidity layer, you help power the markets and earn a share of trading fees. The system is designed to be capital-efficient and reduce risk for liquidity providers.

Strategize

This feature helps you automate how you trade. Whether you’re setting up recurring positions, managing risk, or delegating control to a smart contract, Strategize gives you tools to execute complex strategies without needing to be hands-on all the time.

Telegram Bot

For quick trades on the go, the Telegram Bot lets you access Ostium directly from Telegram. You can check markets, place trades, and manage your positions without leaving the app.

Together, these products create a full-stack experience for anyone who wants fast, flexible, and decentralized access to real-world financial markets.

How Ostium Works

Ostium offers synthetic perpetuals that give users leveraged, onchain exposure to both crypto and real-world assets. Trades are powered by a dual-layer liquidity system, automated off-chain infrastructure, and a risk-adjusted fee model. The protocol is secured through multiple smart contract audits and economic analysis, with real-time data fed through oracles and automated execution via Gelato.

Ostium Trading Engine

Ostium offers synthetic perpetuals that give traders long or short, leveraged exposure to both crypto and real-world assets. These trades are virtual and happen entirely onchain, powered by a coordinated system of traders, liquidity providers, and protocol services.

Key Components

• Traders take positions and are exposed to profit or loss based on asset price movements.

• Liquidity Providers (LPs) supply capital to the Market Making Vault, helping settle trader profits when needed.

• Protocol Services include oracles and automation tools that fetch live prices and trigger things like liquidations or limit orders.

Fee Structure

Ostium charges:

• Opening fees (one-time)

• Holding fees (compounding over time)

• Liquidation fees, when applicable

Fees vary based on risk factors like:

• Trade size

• Open interest (OI) imbalance

• Market volatility

Some fees also help cover infrastructure costs, such as oracles and automation systems.

Shared Liquidity Layer

Ostium’s Shared Liquidity Layer (SLL) is made up of two parts: the Liquidity Buffer and the Market Making Vault. Together, they power the protocol’s ability to settle trades and manage risk.

• The Liquidity Buffer is the first layer that handles trader profits and losses. It grows when traders lose and shrinks when they win. It’s funded by negative PnL and volatility fees but isn’t something LPs can deposit into or withdraw from.

• The Market Making Vault is where LPs provide capital. It only kicks in if the Liquidity Buffer runs out, stepping in to cover profitable trades. In return, LPs earn part of the protocol’s fees and liquidation rewards.

This two-part system reduces risk for LPs and avoids the usual conflict found in many other protocols where LPs benefit from traders losing money. Instead, Ostium is built to reward LPs for supporting growth and volume, not betting against users.

When a trade is opened, some fees are sent to the SLL. While the trade is live, volatility fees go to the buffer. If a trade closes in profit, the buffer pays out, unless it’s empty, in which case the MMV steps in. If the trade closes in a loss, the buffer absorbs it. In liquidations, most of the collateral goes to the buffer, with a small cut going to LPs as a reward.

This setup helps make Ostium more fair, capital-efficient, and stable for both traders and LPs.

Security

Ostium takes both technical and economic security seriously. To ensure the protocol’s safety and resilience, the team has completed multiple layers of audits and risk assessments.

Smart Contract Audits

• Zellic: Completed a comprehensive audit to identify code-level vulnerabilities.

• ThreeSigma: Performed a second independent review to further strengthen smart contract integrity.

• A full list of deployed contract addresses is available, covering everything from trading storage to price oracles.

Economic Audit

• Chaos Labs: Partnered with Chaos Labs for a deep dive into Ostium’s mechanism design, risk parameters, and overall economic security.

• Together, they developed an “Imbalance Score” framework to monitor and adjust protocol risk based on open interest exposure.

• The final audit report from Chaos Labs will be published closer to the official trading launch.

Supporting Infrastructure

To support real-time, onchain trading of synthetic assets, Ostium uses two key off-chain systems: an oracle network and an automated keeper system. These services are essential for fetching asset prices and triggering automated actions like liquidations and limit orders.

Core Infrastructure Partners

• Oracle Services:

  • Stork handles real-world asset price feeds, developed by Ostium Labs and run by partners to keep things decentralized.

  • Chainlink is used for crypto price feeds.
    

• Automation Services:
  

  • Gelato monitors market conditions and automates order execution (including SL, TP, liquidations, and limit orders).

This off-chain infrastructure connects to multiple real-time data providers to ensure price accuracy, uptime, and reliability. Together, these systems allow Ostium’s smart contracts to execute trades with the latest market data while minimizing centralized control.

Roadmap

Ostium has not yet shared a roadmap

Points Program

The Ostium Points Program is a way to reward users for contributing to the growth of the platform. Whether you're trading, referring friends, providing liquidity, or making technical contributions, your activity can earn you points that track your engagement over time.

The program tracks user activity across the Ostium platform and converts that activity into weekly point allocations. Points are earned through:

• Trading and Referrals

• Providing liquidity to the protocol

• Meaningful technical contributions (like open-source work or bug reporting)

At least 500,000 points are distributed each week, and a retroactive airdrop of 10 million points has already been allocated to early users across testnet, private mainnet, and public mainnet.

Start & End Date

• Launched on: March 31, 2025, at 10:00 AM ET

• End Date: No fixed end date. Ostium may update, pause, or terminate the program at any time.

How to Participate

1. Trade on Ostium
   Earn points by going long or short on real-world assets like stocks, commodities, indices, and currencies using the platform.

2. Refer Others
   Share your referral code. For every 5 trading scores your referrals generate, you earn 1 score. New users who join with your code get a 5% trading score boost.

3. Provide Liquidity
   Deposit stablecoins into Ostium’s liquidity vault to earn liquidity provision scores.

4. Contribute to the Protocol
   Submit technical work, critical bug reports, or research. Select contributors may receive bonus points each week.

5. Check Your Score
   Visit ostium.app/points, connect your wallet, and view your score in real time.

Funding

​​Ostium has secured two major sources of funding to support its mission of bringing real-world asset trading onchain:

Arbitrum Foundation Grant

Ostium received a grant from the Arbitrum Foundation to accelerate protocol development and ecosystem growth. The grant will fund incentivized trading contests, infrastructure upgrades, and new product rollouts.

$3.5M Seed Round

Ostium Labs raised $3.5M in a seed round co-led by General Catalyst and LocalGlobe. The round also included backing from SIG, DeFi Alliance, Balaji Srinivasan, Shiliang Tang (LedgerPrime), and over 20 other notable investors and advisors. 

The funds are being used to launch and scale Ostium’s decentralized perpetuals exchange for real-world assets.

Final Thoughts

The rise of real-world assets onchain marks a turning point for decentralized finance, and Ostium is one of the few protocols directly addressing this opportunity with focus and technical rigor. Rather than tokenizing assets, Ostium offers synthetic exposure through perpetuals, sidestepping many of the legal and operational bottlenecks that have slowed RWA adoption in DeFi.

Its architecture reflects this ambition. The dual-vault liquidity system reduces the usual tension between traders and LPs by aligning incentives around long-term protocol growth rather than short-term PnL. Combined with its custom oracle infrastructure, dynamic fee model, and seamless trade execution through Gelato, Ostium has built a trading engine designed specifically for the complexity of traditional markets.

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Disclaimer: All the information presented in this publication and its affiliates is strictly for educational purposes only. It should not be construed or taken as financial, legal, investment, or any other form of advice.