Ostium - Perps for TradFi Assets: What You Need to Know
Macro Tailwinds, Making Trading Mainstream, & More
Crypto markets had a massive rally yesterday, with $BTC shooting right past $100K to reach $103K, where it sits right now ahead of US market open. $ETH rose 20%+, climbing to $2,345. This all began to unfold as the Alea Research team went live for this week’s episode of Market Cap:
Yesterday’s massive rally didn’t coincide with massive US equities or gold moves. A combination of a trade deal inked with the UK and hints at China tariffs being reduced to 50% may have been the largest contributing factors to this rally, with crypto being the fastest-moving horse of all asset classes. Today, Trump has teased 80% tariffs, though implying that this figure may be decided by Treasury Secretary Bessant, and not him.
Either way, it seems tariffs are headed lower, not higher, across the board. As crypto moves erratically alongside other markets, there might be demand to trade majors as well as stocks and commodities on one platform. Yesterday, it was revealed that Robinhood plans to further integrate crypto into its core trading offerings. Something like this currently exists in crypto; Ostium allows users to trade perps of crypto majors, as well as MAG7 stocks, FX, Gold, and other commodities. In today’s edition, we’ll discuss the appeal of Ostium in this current environment and what traders can access on the platform.
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Background on Ostium
We previously covered Ostium last year, but the protocol has gotten much more attention as of late, with TVL and trading volume increasing dramatically. As macro factors continue to be the driving factor of crypto price action, it seems natural that a decentralized protocol providing access to these assets would see more use.
Ostium provides price representation and exposure to traditional assets via perps, putting a crypto spin on leverage for traditional assets. Somewhat similar to Hyperliquid, users simply fund their Ostium account with stablecoins or native tokens from Solana, Base, Arbitrum, Polygon, or Ethereum mainnet. Funding can be done via credit/debit card, and users can also connect existing centralized exchange accounts directly.
The team has rolled out Ostium points and referral rewards to boost the social presence of Ostium. Seeing as the other major platforms in crypto, whether centralized or decentralized, don’t allow the trading of traditional assets, there is a niche that Ostium can carve out for itself for traders looking to dabble in other markets.
Beyond being convenient and accessible for crypto natives, making major global currencies, stocks, and commodities tradable via perpetual futures is not something that is available in traditional markets. This makes Ostium’s offerings unique, with only some crypto exchanges like Bybit providing perpetual futures for traditional assets.
In the past, we’ve seen experimentation around tokenizing stocks with projects like Mirror, though this involved spot holding, not perps trading. Providing traders with new trading vehicles than what they are used to could be an interesting trend to monitor. This also includes options trading of crypto assets, which traditionally hasn’t been nearly as popular as perps. However, putting crypto options in the hands of more mainstream trading platforms could boost their viability beyond what could be achieved with just crypto natives.
Yesterday, Coinbase acquired Deribit for $2.9B, the largest crypto acquisition to date. At the same time, rumors around Robinhood building out their own crypto platform began to circulate. Adjusting crypto assets to fit the needs of traditional retail traders could be a significant unlock for the space.
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