OKX Turns Infrastructure Partners into Investors at $25 Billion Valuation

OKX has raised new funding at a $25 billion pre-money valuation from Circle, Qube Research & Technologies, Ripple and Standard Chartered’s SC Ventures.

The round brings companies already connected to its stablecoin, liquidity and collateral infrastructure onto its shareholder register.

The financing extends the March round led by Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the parent of the New York Stock Exchange. Bloomberg reported that ICE invested approximately $200 million at the same valuation.

Haider Rafique, the company’s Global Managing Partner, said the funding would support its long-term market infrastructure.

OKX founder and CEO Star Xu framed the round as a strategic alignment rather than a capital raise driven by funding needs:

Existing Partners Join the Shareholder Register

OKX linked each investor, either directly or through its wider corporate group, to an existing part of the exchange’s operations.

Circle issues USDC, which is integrated across the platform. Ripple’s competing RLUSD stablecoin is also available through OKX’s unified order book.

Circle and Ripple now hold stakes in a platform that supports both USDC and RLUSD. Their participation allows OKX to deepen its relationships with both companies while retaining a multi-stablecoin model.

QRT plays a different role. OKX described the quantitative investment manager as a major institutional counterparty that provides liquidity and risk capacity and works with the exchange on new products and markets. Its investment adds an ownership relationship to an existing trading connection.

SC Ventures is Standard Chartered’s investment arm. The wider banking group already supports an OKX collateral arrangement by acting as custodian for BUIDL, BlackRock’s tokenised Treasury fund. Eligible institutional clients can use the fund as off-exchange collateral rather than relying solely on assets held directly at OKX.

ICE Investment Leads to Tokenised Stock Project

ICE’s earlier investment has also developed into an operating partnership. The companies subsequently formed OKXICE, which is seeking US regulatory approval for a tokenised securities venue covering shares in 63 publicly traded companies.

The proposed instruments would be offered under the Securities and Exchange Commission’s five-year innovation exemption and are intended to retain rights equivalent to conventional shares.

The platform has not received final approval or begun trading. The latest financing extends the same model across more of OKX’s infrastructure.

Stablecoin providers, an institutional liquidity counterparty and a banking group supporting collateral custody now have a financial interest in the platform through which their services are distributed.

Whether those investments will produce additional product integrations has not been disclosed.

This article was written by Tanya Chepkova at www.financemagnates.com.