OKX adds Circle, Ripple and Standard Chartered's venture arm as investors

OKX has brought in four new investors from stablecoins, trading and banking. The crypto exchange said on October 6 that Circle, Ripple, Qube Research & Technologies and SC Ventures, the venture arm of Standard Chartered, had invested at a pre-money valuation of $25 billion. It did not disclose the amount.

The valuation matches the one at which Intercontinental Exchange, the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, invested in March, CoinDesk reported.

OKX said the round gives it capital to keep growing and to tokenize real-world assets, which means issuing traditional assets as tokens on a blockchain. Founder and chief executive Star Xu described a company moving past its origins. "The exchange was our starting point, and we are evolving into a broader global financial technology platform," Xu said, as quoted by CoinDesk.

The new backers work in fields OKX is pushing into. Circle issues the USDC stablecoin, and OKX's announcement described Ripple as a provider of payments and stablecoin infrastructure and Qube Research & Technologies as a global investment manager.

The investment comes in the same week that OKXICE, the exchange's joint venture with Intercontinental Exchange, filed to offer round-the-clock trading in tokenized shares of 63 US companies, according to CoinDesk.

OKX has not said how much it raised. The size of the round is the open question.