Intercontinental Exchange Inc. is acquiring a stake in OKX in a deal that values the cryptocurrency exchange operator at $25 billion.
ICE, which owns the New York Stock Exchange, will get a seat on OKX’s board, the companies said Thursday in a statement seen by Bloomberg News that didn’t disclose terms. The transaction comes about a year after OKX, which runs one of the biggest crypto exchanges, pleaded guilty to a felony and agreed to pay roughly $504 million in penalties after prosecutors accused it of processing more than $1 trillion of transactions by US customers without a license.
The investment and ICE’s decision to join the board “is a positive signal that we are building a different way than others,” Haider Rafique, OKX’s global managing partner, said in an interview. “We want to partner with other companies that work within the regulatory framework.”
ICE agreed to license OKX’s spot crypto prices to launch US-regulated futures products, executives said. OKX will distribute those products and tokenized equities to its roughly 120 million customers, most of them outside the US. Unlike OKX, the NYSE doesn’t have a consumer-facing app. Fortune reported the news earlier on Thursday.
The digital-asset industry continues to deepen its ties with Wall Street under an accommodating Trump administration. Earlier this week, crypto exchange Kraken said its banking unit has gained access to the Federal Reserve’s core payments system. Meanwhile, the passage of the Genius Act has established a regulatory framework for stablecoins.
“On-chain infrastructure is going to become a critical component of trading clearing, settling and capital formation,” Michael Blaugrund, vice president of strategic initiatives at ICE, said in the interview. “Our plan is to ensure that we have either developed our own capabilities to provide those solutions or to find the leading firms in the world that are building those frontier capabilities.”
Last year, ICE made a $2 billion strategic investment in Polymarket, the blockchain-based prediction market that rose to prominence during the 2024 US elections. The exchange operator and Polymarket also agreed to partner on future tokenization initiatives.
Its investment in OKX shows that the long-established gatekeepers of the US capital markets are working to embed crypto infrastructure into the plumbing of the financial system.
“We’re splicing our DNA in a way that is going to strengthen both organizations,” Blaugrund said.
OKX, formerly known as OKEx, was founded in 2017 by Star Xu after he launched a crypto exchange in China called OKCoin — at a time when that nation dominated trading of digital assets. The firm’s guilty plea came in the early weeks of Trump’s second presidency, just as the US Securities and Exchange Commission began to retreat from a more stringent regulatory regime under the Biden administration.
Executives at both firms said they’ll work to build technology, including blockchain networks, that would give ICE customers access to crypto-based futures and OKX customers the ability to trade tokenized securities on NYSE’s platform.
NYSE announced this year that it’s building a venue to trade tokenized stocks and exchange-traded funds around the clock. Nasdaq Inc. is also seeking approval from regulators to trade tokenized versions of equities on its exchange.
A message from Advisor Perspectives and VettaFi: Discover something new! Click here to register for our upcoming webcasts.
Bloomberg News provided this article. For more articles like this please visit
bloomberg.com.
Read more articles by Katherine Doherty, Muyao Shen
