Circle, Ripple and Standard Chartered Back OKX at Flat $25B Valuation
In brief
- OKX has raised fresh capital at a $25 billion valuation, unchanged from its March round.
- Circle, Ripple, Standard Chartered's SC Ventures and hedge fund Qube Research & Technologies took part.
- The exchange's joint venture with ICE is seeking approval to offer tokenized stock in 63 U.S. companies.
Crypto exchange OKX has raised new funding at a $25 billion valuation from a group that spans a stablecoin issuer, a British bank and a London quantitative hedge fund, Bloomberg reported.
Circle Internet Group, Ripple and Standard Chartered's investment arm SC Ventures all took part, alongside Qube Research & Technologies, which is new to the cap table. The exchange declined to say how much it raised.
The round extends one closed in March, when Intercontinental Exchange, the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, put around $200 million into OKX at the same $25 billion mark, a deal framed at the time around tokenized securities. Seven months on, the price has not moved.
The money "focuses on strengthening OKX's long-term market infrastructure," Haider Rafique, the exchange's global managing partner, said in a statement.
London quant firm QRT, a Credit Suisse spinout, already runs a crypto fund holding about $1 billion. Its investment reflects confidence in "the long-term growth of digital assets and 24/7 markets," said Thomas Eaton, a quantitative trading director at the firm.
ICE and OKX have been building together since March. Their joint venture, OKXICE LLC, said on Monday it is seeking approval to sell tokenized stock in 63 U.S. public companies, Nvidia, Apple and Coca-Cola among them.
The offering would run under the Securities and Exchange Commission's innovation exemption, introduced in September days after the Clarity Act stalled in the Senate. It lets qualifying venues trade tokenized U.S. equities on public blockchains without registering as national securities exchanges, for up to five years, and covers only tokens carrying the same rights as ordinary shares, including dividends and voting. Synthetics that merely track a price are excluded.
The exemption also caps how many stocks each venue can list, and gives issuers 30 days to object to a third party tokenizing their shares. On that timetable, Nvidia, Apple and Coca-Cola each hold a veto over whether their stock appears on the venue at all.
OKX has been building equity exposure by other routes too, having listed perpetual futures on Magnificent Seven stocks and the S&P 500.