Harvard team’s RWA trading platform Ostium raised $20 million and aims to compete with traditional brokerage firms.

[Crypto World] Ostium, a decentralized exchange built by a Harvard-backed team, just secured $20 million in Series A funding, pushing its post-money valuation to $250 million. The lead investors are quite hardcore—General Catalyst and Jump Trading led the round, with Coinbase Ventures, Wintermute, and GSR joining in. Including its previous seed round, the project’s total funding is close to $28 million.

They’re not playing the usual crypto perpetuals game. Ostium targets on-chain trading of real-world assets (RWA) like commodities and stocks, with a focus on overseas investors outside the US who want access to the US market. The co-founder and CEO put it bluntly: “We’re not here to compete with pure on-chain protocols like Hyperliquid; our goal is to challenge traditional online brokers like Robinhood and eToro.”

This approach really hits a pain point. Overseas investors accessing US stocks via traditional brokers often face issues like lack of transparency and outdated technology. Ostium leverages blockchain to boost transparency and efficiency, essentially aiming to “rebuild traditional financial infrastructure using DeFi logic.”

The team is currently 15 people strong, and this round of funding will mainly be used to expand into non-crypto user markets. In other words, they want to attract users who are used to traditional brokers to try out the seamless on-chain trading experience. The RWA sector has been buzzing these past two years, but there aren’t many projects that have truly closed the commercial loop. Whether Ostium can take a bite out of traditional brokers’ market share will depend on whether they can strike the right balance between product experience and compliance.