Crypto.com has announced a $400 million strategic investment from Citadel Securities, valuing the company at $20 billion. The exchange said the capital will be used to expand its businesses in tokenized securities, derivatives, and other asset classes.
The deal is the latest major step in Citadel Securities’ crypto push over the past year. On the surface, the firm looks to be moving quickly into digital assets. Its public regulatory stance tells a narrower story: Citadel appears interested in crypto markets, but not in a version where tokenized securities trade outside the rules that govern traditional finance.
Crypto.com joins a growing list of Citadel-backed crypto platforms
Citadel Securities has only been active in crypto for a relatively short period, but the pace has picked up. In February 2025, Bloomberg reported that the market maker planned to join the roster of liquidity providers on platforms including Coinbase, Binance, and Crypto.com, and could initially build those teams outside the United States.
Its investment activity then accelerated. In November 2025, Ripple completed a $500 million financing round at a $40 billion valuation. According to Ripple, an affiliated fund of Citadel Securities participated as a co-lead investor. That same month, Citadel Securities itself invested $200 million in crypto exchange Kraken at a $20 billion valuation. In July 2026, it followed with a $400 million investment in Crypto.com.
The Ripple round involved an affiliated fund, while the Kraken and Crypto.com transactions were made directly by Citadel Securities. The targets were different, but the pattern was consistent. Each sits closer to crypto infrastructure than to speculative token exposure: trading venues, payments and settlement, and institutional liquidity access points.
The amounts also look more strategic when set against Citadel Securities’ own scale. Bloomberg reported in March that the firm generated a record $12.2 billion in net trading revenue in 2025. On that basis, the $400 million investment in Crypto.com equals roughly 3.3% of that figure, while the $200 million put into Kraken comes to about 1.6%.
That makes these transactions look more like positioning than a directional bet.
Beyond investments, Citadel is building trading capability of its own
Citadel Securities is not limiting itself to minority stakes. Based on previously public information, the firm began hiring for crypto quantitative development and research roles in New York and Miami from February 2026, with the goal of building low-latency trading systems for digital-asset markets.
In other words, the exchange access it is buying may ultimately serve its own market-making desk.
Its involvement with institutional trading venues extends beyond direct investments in outside companies. Citadel Securities is also one of the backers of crypto exchange EDX Markets.
EDX Markets, which is backed by Charles Schwab, Citadel Securities, and Fidelity, applied in April to the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency for a national trust bank charter, according to the information cited in the report. The planned scope includes digital-asset custody, asset management, and trade settlement. Its unit, EDXM International, also plans to launch KRW perpetual futures.
Its infrastructure reach now extends to Zero and ZRO
The most revealing part of Citadel’s crypto strategy may be its move into lower-layer market infrastructure.
In February 2026, cross-chain protocol developer LayerZero launched Zero, a Layer 1 blockchain positioned as institutional financial infrastructure for trading, clearing, settlement, and tokenization use cases. Citadel Securities made a strategic investment by purchasing the network’s native token, ZRO.
LayerZero said Citadel Securities’ role in the collaboration was to contribute market-structure expertise and evaluate how Zero could be applied across trading, clearing, and settlement workflows. Others named behind the chain included DTCC, Intercontinental Exchange, the parent of the New York Stock Exchange, Google Cloud, Ark Invest, and Tether.
Direct token purchases are not common for Citadel Securities. Its earlier investments in Kraken and Ripple were structured through equity. Around the same time in February, BlackRock, Citadel Securities, and Apollo each disclosed plans to buy DeFi governance tokens.
CoinFund founder Brukhman said the tokens being purchased were tied to protocols the firms intended to use as infrastructure, making the trades closer to vendor alignment than asset allocation. He added that traditional financial institutions had long kept their crypto exposure largely to equity and venture investments, while direct token ownership had been rare. This round, he said, broke with that pattern.
Citadel’s regulatory position is stricter than its investment activity may suggest
If investment activity alone were the guide, Citadel Securities would look broadly supportive of crypto. Its submissions to regulators point in a tighter direction.
In July 2025, Citadel Securities sent a letter to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s crypto task force. Based on the public contents of that letter, the firm argued that tokenized U.S. equities should clearly be regulated as securities. It opposed broad exemptions for such products and described those requests as self-interested regulatory arbitrage rather than genuine innovation.
Citadel also said it was concerned that tokenized assets could divert liquidity away from traditional markets, and argued that oversight should focus on market liquidity and investor protection.
Six months later, its position tightened further. In December 2025, Citadel Securities submitted an additional 13-page letter to the SEC. According to the contents cited in the report, the firm asked the agency to bring DeFi protocols that trade tokenized U.S. equities within exchange and broker-dealer regulatory frameworks, arguing that the same security should not be subject to two separate rule sets merely because of different technology wrappers or trading venues.
DeFi groups pushed back, arguing the technology should not be treated as a legacy intermediary
The December letter drew an organized response from the DeFi side. The DeFi Education Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, the Digital Chamber, Orca Creative, attorney J.W. Verret, and the Uniswap Foundation jointly wrote to the SEC, saying Citadel Securities was wrongly trying to classify non-custodial software, developers, and onchain infrastructure as traditional securities intermediaries. They argued that stretching legacy intermediary rules in that way could damage open financial innovation.
Jennifer Rosenthal, a spokesperson for the DeFi Education Fund, framed the dispute in commercial terms. In her response, she said it was very convenient for Citadel to question the legitimacy of a technology that threatens its business and significant market share.
The argument did not stop there. In April 2026, the Blockchain Association submitted another comment letter to the SEC in response to Citadel’s call for tighter regulation. The group said DeFi protocol developers are not brokers or exchange operators and urged the SEC to move forward with an innovation exemption framework for onchain assets.
That leaves a plain dividing line. Citadel Securities argues that the same security should face the same rules. DeFi advocates argue that a different technical architecture should not automatically be forced into the old intermediary model.
The timing is notable as well. Citadel’s investments in Ripple and Kraken landed between those two SEC letters. Its investing and its lobbying moved forward at the same time.
Wall Street’s crypto push is increasingly focused on market structure
Citadel Securities is not alone in taking this route. In recent months, large financial firms have become more specific about how they want exposure to crypto, with a growing emphasis on market access points and the architecture of trading itself.
In March 2026, Intercontinental Exchange announced a strategic investment in crypto exchange OKX at a $25 billion valuation and secured a board seat. The two sides plan to form a joint venture to offer tokenized NYSE stocks and ICE futures to OKX’s 120 million users, subject to U.S. regulatory approval.
At roughly the same time, Nasdaq said it was working with Payward, Kraken’s parent company, to develop an issuance and distribution system for tokenized stocks.
Those moves are concentrated around trading venues and market infrastructure. The underlying question is who gets to build the structure of crypto markets as tokenized finance expands.
There is also a separate track aimed more directly at crypto-related asset exposure. In October 2025, Jane Street disclosed in a 13G filing that it held stakes of about 5% each in bitcoin mining companies Hut 8, Bitfarms, and Cipher Mining, all described as passive trading positions. Around the same time, Citadel founder Ken Griffin disclosed to the SEC that he personally owned about 4.5% of Solana treasury company DeFi Development Corp.
Mining equities and treasury-company shares offer sensitivity to crypto prices. Citadel Securities has chosen another route. From Kraken and Crypto.com to LayerZero, it has concentrated on venues and structure rather than on direct price beta.
What Citadel seems to want from crypto
Seen in that light, the Crypto.com transaction says more than the headline amount alone. For a market maker with more than $12 billion in annual net trading revenue, $400 million is not an outsized check. What it appears to buy is a seat in the tokenized-securities buildout.
Citadel Securities is arguing to the SEC that tokenized securities should remain under securities regulation while also investing in platforms preparing to expand tokenized-securities businesses. Put together, those two tracks outline the kind of crypto market it seems willing to support.
The firm does not appear to oppose assets moving onchain. What it opposes is a version of that shift in which the rules no longer resemble those of the traditional market. As exchanges, clearing institutions, and market makers all move closer to onchain market structure, the battle over who sets the rules for tokenized securities is being defined early.