Circle and SC Ventures Back OKX at $25 Billion Valuation

Crypto exchange OKX has raised fresh capital at a $25 billion valuation from Circle, Ripple, Standard Chartered’s investment arm SC Ventures and hedge fund Qube Research & Technologies.

The financing extends the March round in which New York Stock Exchange owner Intercontinental Exchange invested roughly $200 million at the same valuation, according to Bloomberg. OKX declined to disclose the size of the new funding, the report said.

OKX founder and CEO Star Xu confirmed the four investors on X. “We didn’t raise capital because we needed it,” he wrote, framing the deal as a choice of strategic partners for stablecoins, payments and institutional markets.

Commercial Partners Add Investment Ties

Circle and Standard Chartered already had commercial relationships with OKX before the financing.

Circle said in September that it was working with OKX to expand $USDC liquidity and provide “broader access to $USDC-denominated markets” across spot, margin and futures trading.

Standard Chartered launched a collateral pilot with OKX in April 2025. The arrangement enables institutional clients to use crypto and tokenized money market funds as trading collateral held outside the exchange, with the bank acting as custodian.

ICE’s March 5 investment announcement paired its stake with a board seat at OKX and plans to license the exchange’s spot crypto prices for U.S.-regulated futures. The companies also planned, subject to regulatory approval, to distribute ICE’s U.S. futures and NYSE tokenized equities through OKX to a customer base ICE described as 120 million accounts.

The ICE relationship has since advanced to a planned tokenized-stock venue, as The Defiant previously reported. The venture’s Oct. 4 public notice describes trading through permissioned Uniswap v4 pools on X Layer, with each stock token paired against $USDC, USDG or USDT.