Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo will co-chair a joint venture between cryptocurrency firm OKX and New York Stock Exchange parent company Intercontinental Exchange, the firms said Monday.
Together, ICE and OKX will focus on building infrastructure for tokenized financial products and will explore opportunities for regulatory-compliant blockchain-enabled markets.
The joint venture will also give OKX users access to NYSE tokenized equities and ICE futures markets.
“The next chapter of financial markets will be defined by how well innovation and government regulation can move forward together,” Cuomo said in a prepared statement.
Cuomo, who began working with OKX as a paid adviser in 2023, said he’s “personally excited by the prospect of the societal impact that blockchain technology can lead to: the democratization of finance, bringing basic financial services to underserved populations.”
ICE invested roughly $200 million in OKX in March, Bloomberg reported. The deal valued OKX, which was founded in China in 2013, at around $25 billion.
“The ICE-OKX joint venture is a step toward building the infrastructure that will define how global markets operate in the decades ahead,” Trabue Bland, senior vice president of futures exchanges at ICE, said in a prepared statement.
Cuomo has long been amenable to crypto and the blockchain, signing legislation while governor that established the nation’s first task force to formally study the regulation and definition of the burgeoning technology in 2019.
During his 2025 New York City mayoral campaign, he unveiled plans to turn the Big Apple into the “world capital for digital finance and decentralized innovation” by exploring ways to replace outdated regulation with a modern framework.
Cuomo, however, was defeated by now-Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
Under the pro-crypto second Trump administration, several digital asset firms have bridged their way into the traditional finance realm. Crypto exchange Kraken received a Federal Reserve master account in March – a first for any crypto firm – and several other exchanges have gotten conditional trust bank charters from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.
In an interview with Fortune, the former governor said the joint venture is “not about crypto.”
“This is about blockchain and financial technology, and applying blockchain to other assets,” he said.
