Ostium Hits New Highs as Onchain Macro Perps Gain Traction
Ostium is a decentralized perpetuals exchange on Arbitrum offering leveraged, onchain exposure to real-world assets—including equities, commodities, indices, FX, and crypto—via synthetic perpetual contracts. Recent activity highlights growing traction: ~2,600 weekly active users, cumulative volume above $25B, open interest over $200M, and more than 98% of trading volume now coming from RWAs. Commodity derivatives are driving usage, with Platinum reaching a record ~$50M in open interest. Liquidity providers supplying USDC to the OLP vault are earning elevated yields (~65% APY), reflecting strong fee generation from trading activity.
Why this matters: Ostium illustrates a parallel path to bringing traditional markets onchain, focused on price exposure and leverage rather than ownership. By avoiding tokenization, the platform lowers friction around custody, compliance, and asset issuance, allowing faster expansion across global macro markets. The tradeoff shifts risk toward oracle integrity and basis dynamics, but the data suggests real demand for synthetic RWA perps as a speculative and hedging tool. For institutions, trading firms, and fintechs, this model shows how onchain infrastructure can support liquid, always-on access to traditional asset classes without relying on centralized brokers or region-specific market hours.
Source: dune.com/ostium_app/stats
Robinhood and Susquehanna Signal Institutional Push Into Prediction Markets
Robinhood Markets and Susquehanna International Group have completed a joint venture to acquire a 90% stake in MIAX Derivatives Exchange (with MIAX retaining 10%), securing control of a CFTC-regulated derivatives exchange and clearinghouse. First announced in November 2025, the deal positions the JV to launch new event-based derivatives and prediction market products as early as Q2 2026. The timing aligns with accelerating market activity: weekly trading volume across major prediction market platforms surpassed $6B for the first time.
Parallel to the acquisition, SIG has been scaling its direct participation in prediction markets, operating a dedicated team of ~60 traders providing liquidity and arbitrage on platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket.
Why this matters: Alongside peers such as DRW and Jump, quant firms are increasingly treating prediction markets as a new class of derivatives venue, focused on market making, mispricing detection, and cross-venue arbitrage rather than directional retail speculation. The entry of regulated exchanges, large brokers, and quantitative trading firms is precisely what enables prediction markets to scale beyond retail usage. Institutional liquidity, risk management, and distribution provide the depth, reliability, and price efficiency required for businesses to treat prediction markets as usable infrastructure. We expect more companies to experiment with prediction markets for hedging, forecasting, and decision support, pushing the category toward a durable financial primitive.
Source: dune.com/datadashboards/prediction-markets
Steakhouse Vaults Pass $2B as Morpho’s Curator Model Scales
Steakhouse Financial has surpassed $2B in total assets curated across its vaults on Morpho, becoming the first curator to reach this scale on the platform and marking rapid growth from ~$1.5B at the beginning of 2026. Notably, Base has overtaken Ethereum as Steakhouse’s largest deployment, with ~$1.4B in USDC on Base versus ~$1.2B on Ethereum, supported in part by integrations such as Coinbase’s USDC lending feature powered by Steakhouse-managed vaults. Across this growth, Steakhouse vaults—focused on lending against stablecoins, blue-chip crypto, and RWA collateral—have reported no bad debt events, reinforcing confidence in the curator-led model. At the protocol level, Morpho’s total deposits exceeded $10B in January, alongside a growing roster of vault curators and risk managers, including Gauntlet, MEV Capital, Block Analitica, and others.
Why this matters: Steakhouse crossing $2B underscores how vault curation is evolving into a specialized risk and yield management layer within DeFi, analogous to active management in traditional asset management. As lending protocols become modular, capital allocation, collateral selection, and risk parameters are increasingly delegated to professional curators rather than handled at the protocol level. This shift allows institutions and operators to access lending strategies with defined risk profiles, ongoing oversight, and performance accountability, bringing DeFi lending closer to familiar portfolio construction and mandate-driven allocation models.
Source: dune.com/queries/5468898
Ondo Adds to a Growing Tokenized Equities Stack on Solana
Ondo Finance has expanded its Ondo Global Markets platform to Solana, launching 200+ tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs onchain. The move enables 24/7 trading with near-instant settlement and positions Ondo as one of the largest RWA issuer on Solana by asset count, while AUM on Ethereum and BNB Chain surpasses $500M. Alongside the expansion, Ondo’s platform TVL has surpassed $2B, driven largely by tokenized short-term U.S. Treasuries such as OUSG ($820M+ in T-bills) and growing adoption of tokenized equities and ETFs, with $6.8B+ in cumulative trading volume across chains.
Why this matters: Ondo’s expansion to Solana reinforces a broader shift toward tokenized equities as a serious onchain asset class. Demand for 24/7, programmable exposure to stocks and ETFs is already visible on Solana through platforms like xStocks by Backed Finance, which has seen AUM surpassing $200M and deep DeFi integrations across lending, DEXs, and wallets. Ondo’s entry builds on this momentum, signaling that issuers are increasingly viewing Solana as a viable distribution layer for tokenized securities at scale, complementing, rather than replacing, existing capital markets.
Source: dune.com/ondo/ondo-global-markets
Zama’s Public Sale and the Case for Onchain Confidentiality
Zama is building a confidentiality layer for major public blockchains, enabling encrypted transfers, trading, lending, and real-world asset activity without breaking settlement or composability. Its approach is based on Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), allowing computations to run directly on encrypted data so balances and transaction amounts remain private while staying verifiable onchain. Zama embeds confidentiality at the token level via the emerging Confidential Token standard (ERC-7984), developed with the Confidential Token Association. This enables stablecoins, securities, and DeFi tokens to support selective disclosure and compliance controls while remaining compatible with existing wallets, exchanges, and protocols.
Zama’s public token auction showcases this stack in production. The sealed-bid Dutch auction runs entirely on Zama’s FHE infrastructure, encrypting bids onchain to prevent front-running while preserving auditability. As of January 23, the auction has drawn ~3,500 participants, over 6,400 bids, and ~$935k in confidential USDT, with more than $35M already shielded into cUSDT.
Why this matters: As tokenization expands into private credit, private equity, and institutional payments, confidentiality is becoming a structural requirement rather than a feature. Zama enables core financial workflows—confidential DeFi lending and trading, encrypted stablecoin payments, self-custodial onchain banking, compliant RWA issuance, and sealed-bid auctions—without sacrificing composability or verification, addressing one of the key blockers to institutional adoption of public blockchain infrastructure.
