Intercontinental Exchange — the company that owns the New York Stock Exchange — just bought into crypto exchange OKX at a $25 billion valuation. ICE takes a seat on OKX’s board of directors as part of the deal, announced March 5, 2026. The market didn’t wait for the press release to finish loading.
OKX’s native exchange token OKB jumped over 38% in the hours after the news broke, briefly touching $106.70 before settling around $93. That makes it one of the best-performing crypto assets of the day, on a day when most of the market was doing absolutely nothing.
The actual partnership goes well beyond a financial stake. OKX will let its users trade tokenized stocks and derivatives listed on the NYSE, a feature slated to launch in the second half of 2026. ICE, in turn, gets a live crypto price feed from OKX to power its own futures products.
A Meeting That Was Supposed to Last 30 Minutes
The deal started with a flight to Atlanta. OKX’s Global Managing Partner Haider Rafique met with ICE Chairman Jeffrey Sprecher for what was planned as a 30-minute introduction — it ran four hours. “This is not just a very casual investment,” Rafique told Fortune.
ICE’s VP of Strategic Initiatives Michael Blaugrund put it plainly: “The competitors in the future for firms like Intercontinental Exchange won’t necessarily look like traditional institutions like CME or NASDAQ. They might look like DeFi protocols or super apps.” That’s the most honest thing a legacy finance executive has said about crypto in years.
This isn’t ICE’s first move into digital assets. In November 2025, it put $2 billion into Polymarket. Then in January 2026, it announced a blockchain-based infrastructure project for tokenized securities, with NYSE President Lynn Martin saying the exchange “felt the responsibility to enter into the tokenization conversation.” The OKX deal is the next step, not a sudden change of heart.
OKX: The Comeback Story Nobody Expected to Work
OKX’s path to a $25 billion valuation isn’t a clean redemption arc. The exchange pleaded guilty in April 2025 to operating an unlicensed money transmitting business and paid a $500 million DOJ settlement. It relaunched in the U.S. immediately after — compliance commitments in hand, apparently enough to earn the NYSE’s parent company as a backer.
The exchange now has 5,000 employees and plans to move up to 2,000 of them to the United States. Reuters confirmed the $25 billion valuation and ICE’s board seat on March 5.
Star Xu, OKX’s founder and CEO, said the deal will “help build a more reliable market structure that bridges digital assets and equities.” Reliable market structure — from the exchange that paid half a billion dollars in fines a year ago. The audacity is, genuinely, impressive.
