XRP Issuer Ripple Joins OKX's $25 Billion Funding Round

Ripple Joins OKX's $25 Billion Round

Ripple, the payments company behind the XRP token, has invested in crypto exchange OKX as part of a funding round that values the venue at $25 billion. Circle Internet Group, Standard Chartered's venture arm SC Ventures and London quantitative fund Qube Research & Technologies (QRT) joined the same check, with the size of each commitment undisclosed. The round extends a deal closed in March, when Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, put roughly $200 million into OKX at the identical valuation and took a board seat. The transaction is an equity investment and does not move the XRP price directly, but it places the issuer of the XRP Ledger's native asset inside the ownership structure of a top-tier trading venue. On-chain activity has carried its own momentum lately, with XRP Ledger payment volume jumping 386% to 583.3 million tokens in 24 hours.

Existing Partners, Not New Names

The exchange's official announcement, dated Oct. 6, describes the transaction as an extension of the ICE-led round rather than a new financing, and confirms every backer already works with OKX. Circle issues USDC, which runs across the venue's trading products; in September the two companies expanded USDC across spot, futures and margin trading markets, and Circle funded a margin growth program on the platform. Ripple's RLUSD trades through OKX's unified order book. QRT serves as an institutional counterparty providing liquidity and risk capacity. Standard Chartered holds custody in OKX's institutional collateral framework, a setup that since April has let eligible clients post BlackRock's BUIDL tokenized treasury fund as margin while the bank keeps the asset off exchange. Circle separately launched its Arc blockchain on public mainnet in September, with Standard Chartered among the validators. Founder and CEO Star Xu said the exchange was the company's starting point and that OKX is evolving into a broader financial technology platform.

63 Stock Tokens Under the SEC Exemption

The strategic logic sits in OKXICE, the 50-50 joint venture with ICE announced in June. The venture published a notice dated Oct. 4 listing 63 tokenized stock offerings it intends to offer, with Tesla, Microsoft, Nvidia, Apple, Coca-Cola and JPMorgan among the underlying companies. Trading would run under the innovation exemption the SEC granted on Sept. 17, a five-year window allowing qualifying venues to trade tokenized U.S. equities on public blockchains without registering as national securities exchanges. Tokens must carry the same rights as ordinary shares, including dividends and voting, while price-tracking synthetics are excluded. Settlement would run around the clock against three stablecoins, one of them Circle's USDC. No launch date has been set. Issuers hold leverage under the timetable: companies get 30 days to object to a third party tokenizing their shares, which leaves Apple, Nvidia and Coca-Cola each a veto over whether their stock appears on the venue at all.

OKX Money and a Regulatory Past

The push beyond the exchange itself now includes OKX Money, a standalone app for consumers in select markets that accepts funding in more than 50 currencies and converts balances into dollar-backed stablecoins including USDC, USDT and USDG, with eligible USDG balances earning up to 10% APY. The consumer pivot sits against a regulatory record the company carries with it. In 2025, a U.S. operating entity of OKX pleaded guilty to operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business and agreed to more than $504 million in penalties and forfeiture, per the Justice Department's announcement. QRT, the only newcomer to the cap table, spun out of Credit Suisse in 2018, and Bloomberg reported its crypto fund Moebius holds roughly $1 billion under management as of 2025. Quantitative trading director Thomas Eaton tied the investment to confidence in OKX and the long-term growth of digital assets and round-the-clock markets.

Flat $25 Billion Mark, Undisclosed Checks

For XRP holders, the round reads as structural rather than price-driving. COINOTAG's read of the Oct. 6 announcement: OKX confirmed a $25 billion pre-money valuation but stated no raise size and no individual stakes, and we flag both as undisclosed rather than estimating them. The flat mark seven months after ICE's roughly $200 million check is the notable data point, suggesting no markup was charged on an exchange now preparing 63 tokenized equities. Ripple now holds equity in the venue where its RLUSD trades, a distribution play; Standard Chartered, whose analysts separately map an $12.50 XRP target for end-2028, is doubling down the same way. Treasury vehicles such as Evernorth's 473 million XRP treasury extend the same institutional build-out from the asset side.