Ostium's onchain perpetuals exchange to be 'powered' by Nasdaq data

Onchain perpetuals exchange Ostium said Monday it has partnered with U.S. stock exchange operator Nasdaq.

The tie-up makes Ostium, the "first onchain trading venue to offer equity perpetual products powered by Nasdaq data," the firm said in a post.

"Access to U.S. markets has historically been fragmented, permissioned, broker-gated, and limited by geography," Ostium also said. "Traders worldwide can now gain exposure to U.S. equities on Ostium with the benefits of blockchain rails: transparency, instant-settlement, and self custody."

Ostium is a decentralized perpetuals trading platform that became one of the first to offer leveraged trading in traditional assets, such as stocks, indices, commodities, ETFs, forex, and other assets. The platform has processed over $50 billion in cumulative volume and across more than 26,000 traders, the company said last month.

Ostium serves as a kind of TradFi-DeFi bridge, where users can remain fully self-custodial while benefiting from institutional-grade liquidity, pricing, and depth from offchain venues. 

Founded by Harvard alums Kaledora Kiernan-Linn and Marco Antonio Ribeiro, Ostium has raised $27.8 million to date, including a $20 million Series A co-led by General Catalyst and Jump Crypto, disclosed in December. The firm is also backed by LocalGlobe, Susquehanna and Alliance DAO.

"It took months of discussion and downstream engineering effort around data integrity, security, display policies and more to get us here," Kiernan-Linn, Ostium's CEO said of the Nasdaq partnership.

Ostium posted an advertisement on the Nasdaq building's facade in Times Square on Monday noting that the startup is a "Nasdaq Data Client." The partnership is said to represent a deepening relationship between the firms, an Ostium representative noted.

In March, Nasdaq partnered with Kraken parent company Payward to build infrastructure connecting tokenized equity markets with decentralized blockchain networks.