👁️Overview (Technical)

Decentralized trading infrastructure to allow you to trade anything like a perp.

At a high level, the Ostium protocol features:

Virtual Exposure. The Ostium Protocol enables onchain price exposure to a suite of Real World Assets, beginning with forex, commodities, indices, and blue-chip crypto assets. Ostium is not a tokenization protocol minting off-chain backed equivalents of non-crypto assets (e.g., ERC-20 tokens representing treasury bonds) but rather an application enabling virtual price exposure, entirely onchain, to these assets. This system is facilitated by the exchange of stablecoins between traders and liquidity providers and the use of high-speed oracles for asset pricing.

Vault. A single on-chain liquidity pool that backs all trades and collects fees. LPs deposit USDC to mint OLP and share pro-rata in results. OLP always earns 30% of opening fees in real time. When the system is undercollateralized (c-ratio < 100%), the vault also receives 100% of rollover fees and 100% of liquidation rewards and temporarily becomes the counterparty to net trader PnL at epoch settlement. When the system is overcollateralized (c-ratio ≥ 100%), the vault does not take trader PnL and only accrues opening fees.

Oracle Pricing at Position Open. Pricing at trader position opening is determined via Ostium's RWA oracle infrastructure (operated by Stork Network) or Chainlink low-latency oracle feeds, depending on the asset (RWA vs. crypto). Both feed networks update on a roughly sub-second basis, reporting prices pulled via a combination of sources from the traditional markets for off-chain assets.

Automations: Liquidations, Stop and Limit Orders. Asset price tracking required to determine when Liquidations, Stop and Limit orders should be executed, as well as the execution of these transactions themselves, are performed by either Chainlink Automations and Gelato Functions, depending on the asset. In contrast to protocol-run automations, these services allow for more decentralized and reliable execution, as well as more predictable pricing for users.

Risk-Adjusted Fee Structure. To capture and minimize the risk an open position poses to the Vault via directional exposure, traders are subject to variable fees that compound per block.

• Funding Fees vary as a function of the skew or imbalance in OI for a particular asset, which exposes the SLL to counterparty risk. This fee increases non-linearly with imbalance to encourage arbitrageurs to take the more "unpopular" side of a trade.

• Rollover Fees reflect the underlying market’s holding (carry) costs—primarily interest-rate differentials, convenience yield, and storage/borrow where applicable. It accrues predictably over time and passes real-world costs through to users.

• Conditional Maker/Taker Opening Fees for crypto pairs. To further incentivize closing of Open Interest imbalances on crypto pairs, traders are subject to differential opening fees depending on their categorization as virtual makers or takers. Low leverage (1-20x) “counter-trades” that decrease OI imbalance are subject to reduced maker fees; all other trade types (high leverage and/or increasing OI imbalance) are subject to higher taker fees.