OKX closed new funding at a $25 billion pre-money valuation with commitments from Circle, Ripple, Standard Chartered's venture arm and trading firm Qube Research, the company said Tuesday. The dollar amount of the round was not disclosed.

The raise extends a March investment at the same price from Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), operator of the New York Stock Exchange, founder Star Xu confirmed. The composition of the cap table mirrors OKX's stated ambition to evolve from a crypto exchange into a broader financial-technology platform.

What is the strategic logic?

Every new backer either competes with an OKX product line or already channels business through it. Circle issues USDC. Ripple runs payments infrastructure and issues the RLUSD stablecoin. Standard Chartered holds the assets backing BlackRock's tokenized Treasury fund under an arrangement that flows through OKX. Qube Research is already a liquidity client of the exchange.

"The exchange is the starting point and we are becoming a broader financial-technology platform where customers hold, spend, invest and grow their money in one place," Xu said.

What is the company doing with the capital?

The clearest signal sits in OKXICE, the joint venture with ICE. The entity filed Sunday to launch round-the-clock trading in tokenized shares of 63 U.S. companies, settled in stablecoins on OKX's own blockchain. In the same week, OKX released a consumer app paying 10% on dollar stablecoin balances. Xu disclosed that artificial intelligence now handles roughly 95% of the company's code at a cost of $10 million a month.

Will tokenized equities actually trade?

Market structure remains unresolved. Analysts at Macquarie wrote this week that reliable pricing depends on attracting enough liquidity to populate the order book during off-hours such as 3 a.m. on a Sunday. The bank added that the SEC framework underpinning these products remains temporary, making institutions reluctant to connect core trading systems. Both Macquarie and TD Securities expect initial demand to come from retail, since institutions already have cheap access to U.S. equities.

What else moved across markets?

Macro conditions soured overnight.

• Bitcoin fell 3% to $83,600; ether dropped 5% to $2,580
• More than $540 million in crypto longs were liquidated over 24 hours, led by ether
• Spot bitcoin ETFs absorbed $119 million in net inflows; ether ETFs shed $202 million

The Winklevoss twins filed for a Zcash ETF under the ticker WINK with a 0.25% fee. Their own fund signaled nonbinding interest in buying up to $100 million of shares, making the product the third U.S. Zcash vehicle after offerings from Grayscale and Bitwise.

Peter Thiel's Founders Fund led a $5 million token purchase in Anvil alongside Pantera Capital and Bullish. The protocol lets businesses back payment promises with crypto collateral rather than borrow against them directly.

South Africa's second-largest bank, FNB, opened crypto trading to nearly 9 million customers through its existing share-trading app in a partnership with local exchange VALR. Users can buy bitcoin, ether, XRP, solana or USDT from roughly 55 cents, but the assets cannot leave the bank's platform.

Ledger launched bitcoin-backed loans inside its wallet app, letting users borrow USDC or USDT without selling their coins. Every transaction requires physical approval on the hardware device.

What shutdown is approaching?

Pudgy Penguins' Ethereum layer-2 network Abstract will shut down on December 15 after its parent company lost tens of millions of dollars funding the chain. Roughly $47 million in user funds remain on the network, and holders who fail to move assets before the cutoff lose access.

The OKX tokenized-shares launch, paired with the temporary SEC framework for those products, will determine whether exchange-led equity rails become a durable retail channel through 2026.