OKX raises fresh capital at $25B valuation from Circle, Ripple, SC Ventures and QRT

OKX has raised an undisclosed sum at a $25 billion pre-money valuation from Circle, Ripple, Qube Research and Technologies and SC Ventures, the venture arm of Standard Chartered. The round extends a March investment led by Intercontinental Exchange at the same valuation, Cointelegraph reported in its Oct. 6 coverage.

In its own Oct. 6 announcement, the company stated the raise deepens ties with four partners that each support one layer of its market setup, covering stablecoin issuance, liquidity, collateral and custody. The size of the round was not disclosed.

Founder and CEO Star Xu framed the raise as a step away from a pure trading business. "Our vision is very simple: hold it, pay with it, invest it, and grow it," he said in the announcement. He added that the exchange was the starting point and OKX is becoming a broader financial technology platform.

Xu said the company did not raise because it needed cash. CryptoSlate, citing his Oct. 6 post on X, reported that he picked the newcomers for their fit with OKX plans across stablecoins, payments and institutional markets. "We didn't raise capital because we needed it," he wrote. "We chose to bring in strategic partners who share our long-term vision."

Circle was an early name on the new cap table. Jeremy Allaire, the co-founder, chairman and CEO of Circle, said USDC integration across OKX shows what regulated dollar infrastructure looks like inside an active onchain trading venue, in comments carried by the release. USDC is already integrated across the OKX platform.

Ripple brings payments and stablecoin infrastructure, with its RLUSD stablecoin available across the OKX unified order book, the announcement says. Ripple said the investment opens room to deepen joint work across stablecoins, payments and institutional markets, CryptoSlate reported in the same piece.

Thomas Eaton, a quantitative trading director at QRT, said the investment reflects confidence in OKX and the long-term growth of digital assets and round-the-clock markets, Decrypt reported. The London quant firm became independent of Credit Suisse in 2018 and runs a crypto fund called Moebius with roughly $1 billion under management as of 2025, in an Unchained account of the round.

Standard Chartered connects through custody. The bank serves as custodian for BUIDL, the BlackRock tokenized Treasury fund at the center of a collateral framework built with OKX, CoinDesk noted. Alex Manson, CEO of SC Ventures, said trustworthy infrastructure including institutional grade custody has to come first for serious institutional work in digital assets, in the OKX release.

CoinDesk described the financing as part of a shift from crypto trading venue to financial technology platform spanning payments and tokenized assets. Crypto exchanges that grew up around trading are reaching for stock, derivatives and real-world asset business, that report added.

The ICE relationship already reaches into equities. An OKX-ICE venture published an Oct. 4 notice saying it intends to offer 24-7 trading in 63 tokenized U.S. stocks through permissioned pools on XLayer, settling in USDC, USDT or USDG. The plan sits under the SEC five-year innovation exemption for tokenized stocks, in the Unchained write-up.

Whether institutions follow is unresolved. In a Tuesday note, Macquarie said early demand would likely tilt toward retail investors, since institutions already reach U.S. stocks cheaply and face heavier regulatory and technology costs. The temporary nature of the exemption could hold back spending on systems connections, in CoinDesk coverage.

Haider Rafique, the exchange global managing partner, said the money centers on long-term market infrastructure, in a statement Decrypt carried. The exchange declined to say how much it raised.

ICE put roughly $200 million into OKX in March at the same $25 billion valuation. Unchained reported that ICE took a board seat as part of that deal.

The Oct. 4 notice lists no launch date for tokenized stock trading, in that same account.