Circle Buys a Seat Where 24/7 Wall Street Picks Its Dollar
Circle, Ripple and Standard Chartered's venture arm bought into crypto exchange OKX at a flat $25 billion valuation, days after its ICE joint venture filed to tokenize 63 US blue chips. The tokens settle in payment stablecoins, and Circle prints one of the three initially reported.
Vincent Jiang · 3 min read
The same price, seven months on
OKX confirmed on October 6 that Circle, Ripple, Standard Chartered's SC Ventures and the London quant fund Qube Research & Technologies bought into an extension of its March round at a $25 billion pre-money valuation 2. The check sizes stay secret. Intercontinental Exchange, owner of the New York Stock Exchange, paid about $200 million for its slice in March, at exactly that price 1. OKX chief Star Xu: "We didn't raise capital because we needed it" 2.
What the money watches now
The new shareholders look through to OKXICE, the 50/50 ICE-OKX venture co-chaired by former New York governor Andrew Cuomo 3. Its notice, dated October 4, invokes the SEC's Innovation Exemption, in force since September 17, to trade tokenized shares of 63 companies, Nvidia, Apple and Coca-Cola among them, around the clock on OKX's X Layer, each token carrying the dividends and votes of the real share 134.
Rival printers, one pool
The notice says tokens trade "in pairs with supported payment stablecoins"; no single dollar is blessed 4. The reported starting three are Circle's USDC, the Global Dollar's USDG and Tether's USDT 3. Ripple's RLUSD trades on OKX's order book today and is not among them 2. Two rival dollar printers now own stakes in the exchange that co-owns the venue that chooses between their products 23.
The issuers hold the counterweight: companies that never asked to be listed can block their shares by objecting within 30 days, a right AI-chip maker Cerebras has already exercised 35. OKX's payments app, for what it is worth, pays its top yield, up to 10%, on USDG, not USDC 2.
Why Circle needs the work
Revenue, almost entirely interest on the reserves backing USDC, rose 7% in the second quarter to $701.3 million and still missed estimates of $717.5 million; the reserve return rate fell 66 basis points to 3.5%, and the stock has shed about 20% this year 6. Being the settlement dollar of a new equity market is the demand that would go some way to fixing that.
The awkward part: more than $20 billion of USDC sits inside Coinbase products, over 30% of all USDC in circulation 7. Coinbase keeps a cut of that reserve income and already sells its own tokenized stocks to non-US customers 75.
Circle's revenue ticked up in Q2 2026, but both 2026 quarters sit below the Q4 2025 peak
Data
| Revenue | |
|---|---|
| Q3 '24 | $445.76M |
| Q4 '24 | $435.37M |
| Q1 '25 | $578.57M |
| Q2 '25 | $658.08M |
| Q3 '25 | $739.76M |
| Q4 '25 | $770.23M |
| Q1 '26 | $694.13M |
| Q2 '26 | $701.32M |
Small market, fragile rule
All of it sits on a tokenized-stock market of roughly $3.2 billion, up 15% in a month, per tracker RWA.xyz 9. The exemption is an agency order, not law: it dies in September 2031, caps each venue at 75 top-tier names and 0.25% of a stock's prior-month volume, and Cuomo himself expects the next Congress to scrutinize it 5. The unchanged $25 billion is the market's own review of seven months of work 1.
November decides
Trading cannot start before early November, and Nvidia, Apple and Coca-Cola each get 30 days to stay out 35. Then the tell: which stablecoins the pools actually list, and whether Ripple's dollar makes the next cut. The market that never closes still has to pick a dollar to settle in, and the table that picks it just sold seats at a flat $25 billion.
Deepdive
AI-generated from this story and its cited sources. Not investment advice.
