Ostium, a non-custodial perpetual trading platform, has settled a roughly $15 million fight with a private lender that erupted after its July hack, though hundreds of users with larger losses still don't know how much they will ultimately recover.
- The Arbitrum-based trading platform lost about $24 million on July 15 after attackers compromised infrastructure used to send prices into the protocol.
- The money came from Ostium's liquidity pool, or OLP, where users deposited funds that helped power trading on the exchange.
- In a Wednesday post on X, Ostium's co-founder Marco Antonio Ribeiro apologized for barely communicating with those users over the following two months.
Marco Antonio Ribeiro
The lender fight is over
In September, ESS Frontier, which had taken over claims from Hong Kong lender Minghui Zheng, sued Ostium in New York over roughly $15 million in loans. The lender briefly secured a court order restricting some Ostium assets while seeking arbitration.
- That fight has now been settled.
Court records show the parties signed a settlement agreement on Sept. 24 and the case was dismissed on Sept. 28, though the settlement terms weren't made public.
Ostium said on Wednesday in an X post that resolving the private lender claims and related litigation gave it a "clearer legal and financial foundation."
Larger victims still have to wait
For smaller OLP holders, Ostium now has a clear answer. Users who lost up to $1,000 can claim their losses in full. The company says that covers about 91% of the 3,666 affected wallets.
They can take $1,000 now and give up the rest of their allocation or enter a second recovery program.
And that second plan isn't finished yet.
Ostium says it will be funded by money recovered from the attacker, a share of future protocol revenue and potentially other benefits.
But it hasn't yet disclosed what share of revenue will go to victims or how much they can expect to recover.
So far, Ostium says it has recovered only about $650,000 from the attacker. The remaining assets in the hacked liquidity pool are currently worth roughly 30% of their pre-hack value. Full details of the second recovery stage are promised before an Oct. 30 deadline.
Meanwhile, Ostium says it has been rebuilding the business and plans to unveil the next version of the protocol on Thursday, Oct. 1.