Key Highlights
- Ostium will resume trading on July 23 at 10:00 a.m. ET following last week’s alleged $18 million exploit.
- Existing positions and pending orders will remain active and be repriced using the live market price at reopening.
- Trading will restart gradually, with protective actions enabled before new positions.
Ostium, an on-chain settlement and liquidity layer for Arbitrum, has announced that trading will resume on Thursday, July 23, nearly a week after the protocol suspended operations following an alleged $18 million exploit affecting one of its Arbitrum-based liquidity vaults.
In a post on X on Wednesday, the decentralized trading platform outlined how positions will be handled once the protocol comes back online, while confirming that a broader recovery plan for liquidity providers is still under development.
The update marks Ostium’s first detailed roadmap since trading was halted after blockchain security firm Blockaid reported that attackers had allegedly exploited the protocol’s pricing mechanism to drain approximately $18 million in USDC.
How Ostium will handle existing positions
Rather than closing positions during the outage, Ostium said traders will retain all existing positions and pending orders. When trading resumes, every position will be recalculated using the live market price at 10:00 a.m. ET on July 23, regardless of how markets moved while the protocol remained offline.
“Open positions and pending orders will carry over as they are. Traders do not need to do anything in advance,” the post read.
The protocol said liquidations will only occur if positions fall below their liquidation thresholds based on the reopening price. Similarly, take-profit, stop-loss, and limit orders that are triggered by the reopening price will execute once markets go live.
Why the reopening will be gradual
Ostium said reopening will happen gradually rather than restoring every trading function immediately. Initially, users will only be able to perform defensive actions, including closing existing positions, adding collateral, updating or cancelling orders, executing stop-loss and take-profit orders, and liquidations.
Opening new leveraged positions will only become available after pending orders have been processed. The team said it will announce separately when full trading functionality has been restored.
The recovery plan is still incomplete
While traders now know when markets will reopen, liquidity providers remain focused on what comes next. Ostium confirmed that deposits into the Ostium Liquidity Pool (OLP) will remain suspended for now, while withdrawals will continue to be processed during the next settlement cycle.
The protocol said it will publish another update explaining how new capital committed to the recovery will be distributed among liquidity providers. However, unlike some recent post-exploit recoveries, Ostium has not yet disclosed how losses will ultimately be addressed.
Can Ostium rebuild user confidence?
The incident represents the largest operational setback for Ostium since the protocol launched earlier this year.
In April, Ostium introduced its institutional-backed onchain trading platform, positioning itself as infrastructure that gives traders access to global financial markets while allowing them to maintain custody of their assets.
Now, the protocol faces a different challenge: restoring confidence after one of the largest exploits involving an onchain trading platform this year.
The situation also mirrors a broader trend across the crypto industry. Following its $36 million exploit last month, Humanity Protocol retired its compromised H token, launched a newly audited replacement token, and introduced a 1:1 airdrop alongside a structured compensation program to rebuild trust among users.
While Ostium’s recovery strategy differs from Humanity Protocol’s token migration approach, both incidents illustrate how protocols are increasingly expected to pair technical fixes with transparent recovery plans after major security breaches.
For now, Ostium has confirmed when trading will resume, while additional details on its recovery plan for liquidity providers are expected in a future update.
Also read: SecondFi Reveals Cryptographic Flaw Behind $2.6M ADA Theft
