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OKX completed an extension of its funding round on October 6, 2026, holding its valuation at $25 billion as Ripple, Circle, Standard Chartered’s SC Ventures and Qube Research & Technologies joined the capital, according to Cointribune. The exchange did not disclose how much the four companies invested or what stakes they received.
The deal extends the round that Intercontinental Exchange, the parent of the New York Stock Exchange, led in March at the same valuation, when ICE invested roughly $200 million and gained board representation. Reporting on the transaction was also published by Crypto.news and Coincentral.
Also read: OKXICE Files SEC Notice for 24/7 Tokenized Stock Venue
Key facts
- OKX closed the funding extension on October 6 at a $25 billion pre-money valuation, the same figure set in March, with no amount disclosed for the new commitments.
- Ripple, Circle, SC Ventures and Qube Research & Technologies each already hold a commercial or infrastructure relationship with OKX across stablecoins, liquidity and custody.
- Intercontinental Exchange invested about $200 million in OKX in March, and the exchange’s relationship with ICE has since expanded into oil perpetual futures using ICE Brent and WTI benchmarks in selected jurisdictions.
- Coincentral reported that an OKX-ICE joint venture called OKXICE filed plans to offer 24/7 trading in tokenized shares of 63 U.S. companies, settling in USDC, USDT and USDG on OKX’s X Layer blockchain, under a five-year SEC tokenization framework.
- OKX launched OKX Money, a standalone app converting more than 50 currencies into stablecoins, offering up to 10% yield on certain eligible USDG balances.
Existing partners become shareholders
None of the four new backers is a stranger to the exchange. Circle issues USDC, which is used across OKX trading products; in September the two companies expanded USDC trading across spot, margin and futures markets and introduced a USDC Margin Growth Program funded by Circle. Circle had already deployed native USDC on X Layer, OKX’s Ethereum-compatible layer 2 network, alongside its Cross Chain Transfer Protocol.
Ripple’s RLUSD stablecoin is available through OKX’s unified order book. Jack McDonald, Ripple’s senior vice president of stablecoins, said the investment could lead to more joint work between the companies across stablecoins, payments and institutional markets. Circle co-founder and CEO Jeremy Allaire tied the investment to USDC’s integration across the platform, describing what happens when regulated dollar infrastructure meets an active onchain trading environment.
Also read: Circle and Tether Freeze $318K of Bitget Hack Funds
Standard Chartered handles part of OKX’s institutional custody setup and serves as custodian for BlackRock’s BUIDL tokenized U.S. Treasury fund inside the exchange’s institutional collateral framework, an arrangement that began in April and built on a collateral mirroring relationship dating to 2025. Alex Manson, CEO of SC Ventures, said institutional participation in digital assets requires infrastructure that includes institutional-grade custody.
QRT acts as an institutional counterparty to OKX, providing liquidity and risk capacity. Thomas Eaton, the firm’s quantitative trading director, said the investment rested on confidence in OKX and the long-term growth of digital assets and round-the-clock markets.
Why it matters
The investor list ties OKX’s balance sheet to the stablecoin issuers and custodians it already depends on, which concentrates its infrastructure risk and its funding base in the same handful of firms. It also sharpens the exchange’s push beyond trading: capital from the round will support growth and plans to tokenize real-world assets, according to CEO Star Xu, who said the exchange was the company’s starting point and that OKX is evolving into a broader global financial technology platform. For an exchange that in 2025 saw an entity plead guilty in the United States to operating an unlicensed money transmission business and agree to pay over $504 million in fines and forfeitures, the value of these alliances will be measured by what regulators approve rather than by who signed the cheque. Crypto.news put the valuation as pre-money; Coincentral described the March ICE round the same way.
What to watch
The OKXICE joint venture’s SEC filing is the next checkpoint, and the tokenized stock project is an early test of the SEC’s five-year tokenization framework. Investment bank Macquarie said adoption will depend on whether the platform can attract enough companies and liquidity providers to keep prices steady around the clock, and warned that the temporary nature of the SEC exemption could make institutions hesitant; TD Securities raised similar concerns, according to Coincentral. Macquarie expects retail investors to adopt faster than institutions.
Reported by cointribune.com.
Sources: Cointribune, Crypto.news, Coincentral