Ostium Labs Launches Public Mainnet for Perpetual Trading

Ostium Labs, a new blockchain-based perpetual trading startup, unveiled its public mainnet on Thursday. Unlike other on-chain trading platforms, Ostium is targeting global macro markets and traditional currencies.

In essence, it's an on-chain platform for trading non-digital assets.

Named after the ancient Roman port city, the platform enables one-click trades on traditional assets via a crypto wallet. Ostium allows smaller traders to participate with minimal investment, compared to less accessible web2 platforms.

> "With $10 you could trade any asset that you wanted to express a market view on rather than going through these very gated, more traditional sort of underlying asset marketplaces or going through these sort of synthetic markets that have all sorts of market structure issues," said Ostium CEO Kaledora Kiernan-Linn in an interview with The Block.

Kiernan-Linn and co-founder Marco Ribeiro conceived the idea of a permissionless trading environment while studying at Harvard. They aimed to trade commodities like lithium and wheat during the Russia-Ukraine war but faced limited options.

> "The contract sizes on places like the CME are large, and we found it quite difficult to do," recalled Kiernan-Linn, a former ballerina at the Royal Danish Ballet.

Ostium employs a centralized listing process where users can request the addition of markets for assets such as silver or the Hang Seng Index. Users can trade synthetic versions that mimic the prices and can take either long or short positions.

The team developed a blockchain oracle for real-time data and collaborates with third parties for OTC and market maker data, also utilizing the Ethereum-based infrastructure provider Gelato for automation tasks.

The startup, supported by investors including LocalGlobe, General Catalyst, Susquehanna, and Alliance DAO, operates under the premise that trading assets is a way to express views on current and future events, such as wars or elections.

Despite a limited user base during the testnet phase, Kiernan-Linn noted a clear demand for a trading platform focused on real-world assets. Following China's new quantitative easing policy, Ostium experienced a 550% spike in its FX and commodities perpetual volumes. Increased discussions among crypto traders about traditional assets were also observed.

> "The vision is that anybody can have a view on the future and could express that through a particular strategy," Kiernan-Linn stated. "If Trump wins and the odds of Powell cutting rates four times in the next quarter are over 75%, I wanna go max long some basket of risk assets. I would call that a bullish U.S. strategy."