Ostium Labs has launched a new decentralized execution layer designed to deliver institutional-grade execution for onchain access to traditional market exposure. Jump is among the hedging partners supporting the system, alongside prime brokers and major institutions. The upgrade is intended to let users gain wallet-based market exposure without giving up custody of their funds.
A shift in risk management
Under Ostium’s previous structure, the protocol’s public liquidity pool absorbed all net directional exposure. With the new execution layer, that framework changes. A separate capital pool now handles net exposure, while institutional partners hedge that exposure offchain. Daily settlement then takes place against a buffer layer positioned above the public liquidity pool. In effect, Ostium is moving from a model centered on a single public pool to a more segmented structure for managing trading risk.
Positioning against the CFD market
Ostium is presenting the new system as a transparent, self-custodial alternative to the traditional contracts-for-difference market, which it estimates at roughly $10 trillion in monthly volume. By combining onchain transparency with user-controlled custody, the protocol is aiming at traders who want access to a broad set of markets without relying on centralized intermediaries to hold their capital.
The company also pointed to its existing scale. According to the announcement, Ostium has processed more than $50 billion in trading volume, generated nearly $35 million in revenue, and served over 26,000 traders. Those figures help frame the launch as an expansion of an already active trading platform rather than an early-stage concept.
Buildout and next phase
CTO Marco Antonio Ribeiro said the infrastructure was built by 15 engineers over four months, and described it as the first onchain flow programmatically hedged through traditional market participants. The launch also comes after Ostium closed a $20 million Series A, giving the company additional resources to deepen its execution stack and institutional integrations.
More broadly, the release signals Ostium’s effort to connect self-custodial onchain trading with offchain hedging capacity and institutional execution standards. For the decentralized derivatives sector, that hybrid approach could become an increasingly important model as protocols compete on execution quality, capital efficiency, and risk design.