- OKX recently raised its valuation to $25 billion after key investments from Circle, QRT, Ripple, and Standard Chartered.
- Company CEO Star Xu clarified that the strategic investments weren’t because they needed the capital.
OKX CEO Mingxing Xu, a.k.a. Star Xu, just made a major flex as their company locked in strategic investments from crypto-native and traditional finance institutions. The event raised the exchange’s valuation to $25 billion. However, he claimed that they raised capital not because they’re cash-strapped.
Building Strategic Partnerships
Beyond that, Star highlighted that OKX wanted to bring in partners that shared its long-term vision as it navigates the ever-evolving financial landscape.
“We didn’t raise capital because we needed it,” said Star. “We chose to bring in strategic partners who share our long-term vision for stablecoins, payments, institutional markets, and the next generation of financial infrastructure.”
Additionally, the CEO noted that despite being in the industry for 13 years and rising to become one of the world’s top crypto platforms, it’s still relatively early in the game. He pointed out, “There’s more to build.”
OKX and ICE Joint Venture
Star’s statement comes hot on the heels of OKX’s joint venture with Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the New York Stock Exchange’s parent company, which created OKXICE LLC. According to their October 4 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the venture aims to launch a tokenized stock exchange.
In an extension of the round led by ICE, OKX secured strategic investments from the following:
- Circle: A leading internet financial platform and issuer of USDC, the world’s largest regulated stablecoin.
- QRT: A global multi-strategy investment manager and major institutional counterparty to OKX.
- Ripple: A crypto-native company providing a wide range of institutional-grade, blockchain-based solutions focusing on cross-border settlement, treasury management, liquidity management, blockchain infrastructure, stablecoin payments, and more.
- Standard Chartered: A long-standing partner of OKX, serving as custodian for the BUIDL tokenized Treasury fund launched in partnership with the exchange and BlackRock.
OKXICE initially plans to become a venue for trading tokenized shares of Microsoft and Tesla. The move leverages the SEC’s newly released Innovation Exemption framework, which offers temporary relief to firms that facilitate trading of tokenized stock on-chain through automated market makers (AMMs) under a five-year window.
Per CoinMarketCap data, OKX currently has more than $21.87 billion in total assets. Meanwhile, it has recorded roughly $2.22 billion in trading volume over the last 24 hours alone.
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