March 5 (Reuters) – OKX, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, was valued at $25 billion after receiving a minority stake from Intercontinental Exchange, the NYSE parent said on Thursday.
The investment, which puts OKX’s value above recent market entrants Bullish and Gemini, highlights how major Wall Street institutions are racing to build digital-asset infrastructure as crypto grows into a key part of real finance.
Some details about the strategic agreement:
* ICE will license OKX spot crypto prices and launch US-regulated futures contracts. * OKX will become the distributor of ICE’s US futures and indexed equity markets to more than 120 million people worldwide. * The investment follows ICE’s recent stake in Polymarket, the world’s largest futures market. * Analysts say the crypto industry may have reached a tipping point that could signal the end of a bear market after US President Donald Trump signaled support for clarification legislation on Tuesday. OKX Global Managing Partner Haider Rafiq told Reuters: “There was a window of time to do the clarification. It looks more challenging as time goes by and we are getting closer to the medium-term conditions. Maybe we should have accepted the market structure bill and then pushed for adjustments.” * OKX rival Kraken Banking’s unit on Wednesday became the first US digital asset bank to gain access to the Federal Reserve’s payments system through a limited-purpose account, marking a major win for an industry that has for years sought access to the Fed’s trillion-dollar payment rails. “I think it’s very likely that we’ll go down this path in the future, and I hope it doesn’t take us six years,” Rafiq said. * ICE, which was also a previous investor in Coinbase, will get a seat on the OKX board. Terms of the investment were not disclosed.
(Reporting by Atif Bhandari and Arasu Kanangi Basil in Bengaluru; Editing by Shilpi Majumdar)
