OKX has announced the completion of a strategic funding round from Circle, Qube Research & Technologies (QRT), Ripple, and Standard Chartered’s SC Ventures at a pre-money valuation of $25 billion. This is an extension of the round led by Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the parent company of the NYSE, in March 2026, with the specific amount undisclosed.

The four new investors are already infrastructure partners

The notable takeaway lies not in the valuation figure, but in the participants. All four entities investing this time already had existing business relationships with OKX, each handling a different layer of the same system.

  • Circle is the issuer of USDC, the largest regulated stablecoin on the market.
  • QRT is a multi-strategy fund and a major institutional partner providing liquidity to OKX.
  • Ripple brings payment infrastructure and stablecoins, with RLUSD already live on the exchange’s unified order book.
  • Standard Chartered serves as asset custodian for BUIDL, the tokenized Treasury fund within the collateral framework jointly built by OKX and BlackRock.

Star Xu, founder and CEO of OKX, described the vision with four verbs: hold, spend, invest, and earn. He stated that the exchange is merely a starting point, and the company is progressing toward a broader financial technology platform, combining crypto technology with the standards users expect from global financial institutions.

Valuation remains unchanged, but the shareholder roster expands

In the initial round in March 2026, ICE invested $200 million in OKX, also at a $25 billion valuation. This time the valuation remains unchanged, meaning the company’s valuation has not increased over seven months, but the roster of strategic shareholders has expanded significantly.

Alongside the funding round, a joint venture between OKX and ICE filed with the SEC to launch a tokenized U.S. stock trading platform under the regulator’s new sandbox exemption framework. In the same week, OKX also announced the OKX Money app for stablecoins and stated that tokenized stocks would launch soon.

Three consecutive moves in a matter of days show that OKX’s ambitions no longer stop at crypto trading. The exchange is positioning itself as the infrastructure layer bridging digital asset markets with the traditional financial system, where stablecoins serve as payment rails, tokenized assets as commodities, and custody services as the foundation.

What to watch?

Infrastructure partners doubling as investors raises questions that lack clear answers. Circle supplies stablecoins to the exchange, Ripple brings its stablecoin to the order book, QRT acts as a liquidity partner, and Standard Chartered holds custody of assets. When all hold equity stakes, the lines between client, supplier, and owner become blurrier than before.

This is not yet an established legal issue, but rather a relationship structure that bears watching. The question worth asking: as an exchange increasingly relies on its own shareholders to operate core infrastructure, who provides the checks and balances if one layer experiences an issue?