Is OKX's $25 Billion Valuation Really Justified?
The parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, ICE (Intercontinental Exchange), has recently shown much greater interest in cryptocurrency than in previous years. First, it invested $2 billion in Polymarket, pushing the leading prediction market's valuation to $90 billion. It then quickly invested in the cryptocurrency exchange platform OKX, raising the valuation of this well-known platform in the Chinese-speaking region to around $25 billion.
OKX is about to be listed in the U.S., which is no longer news. ICE's investment, combined with the upcoming U.S. listing, as Fortune puts it, is transforming OKX from an East Asian offshore trading platform to a globally compliant hub operating in the United States.
In simple terms, the United States will be OKX's new home.
What's interesting about this is that the United States, a market that was virtually blank for the world's largest exchange platform, Binance, has now seen several giants gearing up to make a big impact.
Coinbase, the current leading U.S. exchange platform, with BlackRock's support, has a CEO who is tough enough to challenge the entire industry.
Kraken, the second oldest compliant trading platform, is rumored to be going public in the first quarter.
Upbit is also about to be listed in the U.S., with strong earning potential. After being robbed of $36 million, it could recover the amount in just two weeks.
Of course, there are also already listed but relatively low-profile platforms like Gemini, Bullish, and others, as well as the upcoming listing of OKX.
So, is a $25 billion valuation expensive?

According to BlockBeats' analysis of exchange platforms in 2025, OKX's $25 billion valuation doesn't seem expensive.
Coinbase has a spot trading volume similar to OKX but almost no futures trading volume, with a market cap of $55 billion, double that of OKX.
Kraken is lagging behind OKX in both spot and futures trading volumes, with a $20 billion valuation, only 20% lower than OKX's valuation; while Upbit, despite being South Korea's largest, lacks USDT">a futures section, and its earning potential seems far less than OKX's. Upbit has a $10.7 billion valuation, making OKX's valuation more than double that of Upbit's.
Robinhood has 23 million users, but the disclosed Crypto section's trading volume for 2025 is only $82 billion, making it incomparable.
Apparently, looking at the data, 250 billion is underestimated, considering the publicly available user count. OKX is already the largest in terms of users, and this is basically without any U.S. users yet. Considering the user count of Coinbase and Kraken, OKX theoretically has tens of millions of new users to tap into.
This means that the U.S. stock market is about to welcome a user base that will be twice that of Coinbase, with an overall trading volume much larger than Coinbase, yet valued at only half of Coinbase's trading platform.
The listing time for OKX is currently unknown. Based on Polymarket, it seems unlikely to list this year. There have been some rumors suggesting that OKX's listing time might be in 2028, hopefully a year much more promising for cryptocurrency than the present.
The hopefulness depends on the narrative, which is also what ICE values in this investment. Reports indicate that this investment aims to drive the development of blockchain-based stock trading, in other words, stock tokenization.
OKX's founder and CEO, Star, shares the same sentiment. He mentioned that OKX plans to provide its global user base of over 1.2 billion with access to ICE's U.S. futures market and New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) tokenized stock market opportunities, exploring a path for the convergence of traditional financial markets and digital asset infrastructure within a compliant framework.
The integration of Tradfi and Crypto is no longer a question of possibility but rather a question of the extent of integration. There was once a platform that saw this trend a few years ago and envisioned that the ultimate competitor in the future must be Nasdaq. Thus, they aimed to create an on-chain Nasdaq, reaching a valuation of 32 billion USD. Unfortunately, they took a wrong step. Nevertheless, an on-chain Nasdaq is Crypto's inevitable path, and now it is a race to see who will secure the leading position in this new narrative.
OKX's growth journey certainly has had many twists and turns, but it remains a great story.
Still, he is a Chinese entrepreneur who has just turned 41 this year, founding the company in 2013, undergoing three rebranding efforts, expanding the business to be regulated by multiple countries, and having to pay a $500 million fine to the U.S. Department of Justice, ultimately culminating in a successful listing in the U.S.
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