Final summer season, Haider Rafique flew out to Atlanta to satisfy with the chairman of the company that owns the New York Inventory Exchange. What was speculated to be a 30-minute chat turned into a four-hour marathon dialog, recalled Rafique, the worldwide managing accomplice of company affairs at OKX, one of the world’s largest crypto exchanges.
Quick-forward a number of months and what began as an off-the-cuff chat turned a collection of conferences, intense due diligence, and finally a mammoth deal. Intercontinental Exchange, the publicly-traded parent of the New York Inventory Exchange, has invested in OKX at a $25 billion valuation and can sit down on OKX’s board, the 2 companies introduced on Thursday. Rafique declined to specify how a lot cash Intercontinental Exchange put into OKX or the phrases of the funding, however did tout the companies’ shared imaginative and prescient of the longer term.
“There was nice chemistry in how we seemed at the world and the longer term of tokenized securities, how derivatives ought to make it to the worldwide stage, how TradFi [and] digital property ought to merge collectively,” mentioned Rafique, referring to his preliminary sit down with Jeffrey Sprecher, the chairman of Intercontinental Exchange.
The tie-up isn’t a pure enterprise play. OKX will present Intercontinental Exchange with a stay worth feed of cryptocurrencies tradeable on its exchange. However much more considerably, OKX will let its customers commerce tokenized stocks and derivatives listed on the New York Inventory Exchange in a function prone to launch in the latter half of 2026. Tokenization refers back to the course of of taking monetary property and placing them into blockchain wrappers, which proponents say can cut back transaction charges, amongst different advantages. “This isn’t only a very informal funding,” mentioned Rafique.
New competitors
The injection of capital into OKX is a giant dedication from the proprietor of the world’s marquee inventory exchange, however it isn’t the primary transfer that Intercontinental Exchange has made to maintain tempo with the quickly shifting panorama in how individuals commerce. In November, the buying and selling large mentioned it could make investments $2 billion into the prediction market Polymarket in a deal that valued the startup at $9 billion. And in January, Intercontinental Exchange announced that it was growing its personal blockchain-based buying and selling infrastructure for tokenized securities.
The buying and selling large additionally isn’t the one veteran monetary company to make a guess on a crypto agency as buying and selling habits shift. In November, the market maker Citadel Securities invested $200 million into Kraken in a deal that valued the digital property exchange at $20 billion.
“The opponents in the longer term for companies like Intercontinental Exchange gained’t essentially appear to be conventional establishments like CME or NASDAQ. They could appear to be DeFi protocols or tremendous apps,” mentioned Michael Blaugrund, the vp of strategic initiatives at Intercontinental Exchange, referring to the likes of Robinhood and Uniswap, the DeFi platform that just lately introduced a tie-up with BlackRock.
In an interview, Blaugrund declined to present extra specifics on how his company was constructing a blockchain-based buying and selling platform. That initiative and the plan to let OKX customers commerce tokenized stocks are “complementary tasks, however they’re not a single challenge,” he mentioned.
For OKX, the partnership with Intercontinental Exchange is part of the company’s push to refashion its picture from an offshore exchange in East Asia into a world buying and selling hub that performs by the foundations in the U.S.—particularly as its competitor Binance has come beneath recent fire for its compliance program. “We’re the sober ones in the trade in some ways,” claimed Rafique.
In April, OKX relaunched in the States two months after it reached a $500 million settlement with the Division of Justice in which it pleaded responsible to 1 depend of working an unlicensed cash transmitting enterprise. Rafique mentioned that he plans to relocate as much as 2,000 of his exchange’s 5,000 workers to the U.S. however declined to present a timeline. ”Particularly to assist this product, I feel we’d completely make investments loads in the U.S.,” he mentioned, referring to the plan to let OKX customers commerce tokenized stocks and different property from Intercontinental Exchange on its platform.
And Rafique hopes that that plan isn’t the final time OKX works with Intercontinental Exchange, or ICE. “We’re a three-letter company. They’re a three-letter company,” he mentioned. “And my aspiration is that possibly there’s a a lot greater relationship.”
See you tomorrow,
Ben Weiss
X: @bdanweiss
Electronic mail: benjamin.weiss@fortune.com
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Correction, March 5, 2026: Clarified Jeffrey Sprecher’s position in connection to the New York Inventory Exchange.
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This story was initially featured on Fortune.com
