Crypto.com valued at $20 billion in Citadel Securities deal

Crypto.com has landed a $400 million investment from Citadel Securities that values the crypto exchange at $20 billion, according to an announcement from the company on Thursday. For everyday investors, the deal matters because one of Wall Street’s biggest trading firms is putting capital behind a crypto platform that wants to move beyond coins into more traditional financial products.

Crypto.com said the investment is its first institutional funding round since it was founded in 2016. The Singapore-based exchange said it plans to use the money to expand across asset classes, including tokenized securities and derivatives.

Tokenized securities are financial assets, such as stocks or bonds, represented digitally on a blockchain. Derivatives are contracts whose value is tied to another asset, such as a stock, commodity, currency or crypto token. For a crypto exchange, offering more of these products can mean becoming a broader trading venue rather than only a place to buy and sell digital coins.

Citadel Securities, the market-making firm founded by billionaire Ken Griffin, will receive a stake in Crypto.com through the investment, according to the company announcement. A market maker is a trading firm that helps match buyers and sellers by quoting prices, which can make markets easier to trade.

Crypto.com co-founder and CEO Kris Marszalek said on X that the round was the company’s first institutional financing and called it the start of a new growth phase. In the company’s announcement, Marszalek said the opportunity ahead is “staggering” as crypto becomes more connected to finance.

Wall Street keeps moving toward crypto

The Crypto.com deal adds to a wider push by traditional finance firms into digital assets. The announcement follows Citadel Securities taking a stake in Kraken, another crypto exchange, as well as crypto-related investments by Intercontinental Exchange, Nasdaq and other market operators, according to Decrypt.

That trend is significant because large trading firms and exchange operators bring capital, market structure experience and institutional relationships. Their involvement does not remove the risks tied to crypto markets, but it shows that established finance companies are treating digital assets as a business line worth building around.

The deal also comes as Crypto.com’s own token, CRO, rose while several major cryptocurrencies traded lower. Price data from CoinGecko displayed by Decrypt showed CRO at $0.059202, up 6.05%. Bitcoin was listed at $63,008, down 1.69%, and Ether at $1,834.73, down 2.67%.

Crypto.com did not say in the announcement how large Citadel Securities’ ownership stake will be after the investment. The company also did not disclose specific launch dates for its planned expansion into tokenized securities or derivatives.

This story draws on original reporting from Decrypt.