Ostium partners with Nasdaq for onchain U.S. equity perpetuals

Ostium announced Monday that it has partnered with Nasdaq to use Nasdaq market data to power onchain U.S. equity perpetual contracts. The platform will offer instant settlement and allow traders to hold exposure to U.S. stocks in self-custody on a blockchain-based trading venue.

Perpetual contracts are derivatives that track an asset’s price and let traders take leveraged positions without owning the underlying shares. Ostium will source pricing from Nasdaq while executing and settling contracts onchain. The company described itself as the first onchain trading venue to offer equity perpetual products powered by Nasdaq data. Ostium wrote on social media: “Access to U.S. markets has historically been fragmented, permissioned, broker-gated, and limited by geography. 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 reported that the partnership required months of technical work and legal and policy discussions. Kaledora Kiernan-Linn, Ostium’s CEO, wrote that “it took months of discussion and downstream engineering effort around data integrity, security, display policies and more to get us here.” The startup posted an advertisement on the Nasdaq building facade in Times Square noting its status as a Nasdaq Data Client. An Ostium representative described the agreement as a deepening relationship with Nasdaq.

Ostium is a decentralized perpetuals exchange that offers leveraged trading in stocks, indices, commodities, ETFs and forex. The company said its platform has processed more than $50 billion in cumulative volume across over 26,000 traders. Ostium was founded by Harvard alumni Kaledora Kiernan-Linn and Marco Antonio Ribeiro and has raised $27.8 million to date, including a $20 million Series A co-led by General Catalyst and Jump Crypto. Other backers include LocalGlobe, Susquehanna and Alliance DAO.

Nasdaq has expanded efforts to connect capital markets infrastructure with blockchain networks. Earlier this year Nasdaq worked with Payward, the parent company of crypto exchange Kraken, on infrastructure for tokenized equity markets that interact with decentralized networks. The Ostium agreement adds a market-data feed to the trend of linking established market indexes and feeds with onchain trading venues.

Ostium said the Nasdaq feed will provide synchronized market prices for perpetual contracts while settlement occurs on the blockchain rather than through traditional broker custody. The firms did not disclose commercial or technical terms beyond the data-client relationship and the public statements about the partnership.