Crypto exchange OKX is drawing fresh backing from traditional finance institutions. According to Bloomberg, the company is bringing in investors including Standard Chartered and Circle at a valuation of about $25 billion.
Speaking the same day at the OKX NOW conference in Singapore, OKX founder Star Xu said large institutions from the exchange, banking, stablecoin, payments, and quantitative finance sectors are making equity investments in OKX. He named Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), Standard Chartered, Ripple, and Circle among them.
ICE had already invested in March
The latest round comes after ICE, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, bought about $200 million of OKX in March at the same $25 billion valuation. ICE also obtained a board seat as part of that transaction.
That means the new batch of financial institutions is joining roughly half a year later with OKX still holding the valuation set in the previous round while continuing to add strategic shareholders.
Partnership has moved beyond a financial investment
Cooperation between ICE and OKX has already expanded beyond capital. In June, the two sides formed a 50:50 joint venture called OKXICE, with the aim of linking traditional exchange markets and on-chain finance.
More recently, they have been seeking approval from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to trade tokenized U.S. equities. Those stock tokens are expected to be backed one-to-one by actual shares and run on OKX’s X Layer.
OKX at $25 billion versus OKB at about $2.697 billion FDV
ABMedia also compares OKX’s equity valuation with its ecosystem token, OKB, and points to a clear gap between the two.
CoinGecko data showed that as of Oct. 6, OKB was trading at about $128.4. Circulating supply, total supply, and maximum supply were all about 21 million tokens, putting both market capitalization and fully diluted valuation at roughly $2.697 billion.
Using OKX’s latest $25 billion company valuation, OKB’s FDV amounts to only about 10.8% of the company’s valuation.
BNB FDV is already above $100 billion
The article then turns to Binance and BNB for comparison. CoinGecko data showed BNB at about $786 with circulating supply near 130 million tokens and market capitalization around $104.7 billion. Because its supply structure is close to fully circulating, its FDV also sits above $100 billion.
CoinGlass’s exchange market share report for the first quarter of 2026 showed Binance posting $4.90 trillion in derivatives trading volume and a 34.9% market share. OKX recorded $2.19 trillion, or about 45% of Binance’s scale, equal to roughly 15.6% share. On derivatives volume alone, Binance was about 2.2 times larger than OKX.
Another study estimating “real market share” from on-chain assets and trading volume found Binance at about 45.7% and OKX at about 17.3% after excluding part of the suspected fake volume, a gap of about 2.6 times.
Under either method, Binance’s centralized exchange market share is roughly 2 to 3 times that of OKX, far smaller than the nearly 40-fold FDV gap between BNB and OKB.
If OKX’s $25 billion valuation were scaled simply in proportion to the 45.7% versus 17.3% “real trading volume market share” figures, Binance would map to a valuation of about $66 billion, calculated as $25 billion multiplied by 45.7 divided by 17.3.
Even on that basis, the implied figure remains well below BNB’s current FDV of about $104 billion.
If the CoinGlass derivatives volume ratio is used instead, Binance’s scale at about 2.2 times OKX would imply a corporate value of roughly $55 billion to $56 billion. BNB’s FDV would still be close to twice that level.
The article adds that this type of calculation can only serve as a rough comparison and cannot be used directly to derive a fair exchange valuation. Revenue mix, fee structure, user assets, regulatory licenses, geographic exposure, and other business lines all affect valuation.
The article first appeared on ABMedia.