All articles are carefully reviewed and reviewed by leading blockchain experts and industry experts.
- Crypto.com is Citadel Securities’ third crypto exchange in thirteen months, after Kraken and Ripple.
- Citadel also owns a fourth platform, EDX Markets, which applied for a national bank license in April.
- In December, Citadel asked the SEC to regulate DeFi platforms that sell tokens as a traditional exchange.
- The combined move provides Citadel with a trading platform, a corporate platform, and a dedicated network.
More about Citadel Securities’ $400 million on Crypto.com they see it as an independent field. A look back at what market makers have done over the past thirteen months tells the story. Crypto.com is the third crypto exchange Citadel has bought in a long time, after the $200 million position of Kraken and the $500 million round that valued Ripple at $40 billion. It also comes weeks after EDX Markets, Citadel exchange Citadel launched in 2023, subscribed to its National Trust bank charterand seven months after Citadel told the SEC that the decentralized platform trading tokenized stocks must meet the same rules as traditional exchanges. Each of these in itself is a small business case. Accumulated through thirteen months, they explain the firm’s purchase position in each layer of the tokenized price moves, from the upper rail to the retail exchange, while the promotion of raising the price of the layer does not exist.
Four Walking Advertisers Read Like Four Different Stories
The timeline is more important than the size of a single trade. Citadel The upgrade of Ripple in November together with Fortress Investment Groupand Pantera Capital, Galaxy Digital, Brevan Howard, and Marshall Wace are also participating, and will ensure the XRP Ledger implementation infrastructure. Two weeks later it invested $200 million in Kraken’s $800 million bid as a second option, behind interest. the first group led by Jane StreetHSG, Oppenheimer, and Tribe Capital. In April, EDX Markets, Citadel’s only platform built by Fidelity and Charles Schwab back in 2023, filed an OCC bank statement and began processing KRW/USD fixed assets. Crypto.com blocks ads.
| Day | Move it | Market Segmentation |
|---|---|---|
| November 5, 2025 | Co-leads $500M round valuing Ripple at $40B | Settlement / payment methods |
| November 19, 2025 | $200M strategic tranche in Kraken’s $800M round ($20B valuation) | Exchange #1 |
| December 2, 2025 | The SEC’s formal letter against a broad DeFi exemption for tokenized equities | Administrative representation |
| April 1, 2026 | Co-owned EDX Markets operates under an OCC national trust bank charter | Institutional exchange, which has |
| July 16, 2026 | $400M valuation in Crypto.com ($20B valuation, first corporate round) | Exchange #2 |
The Exchange Citadel Is Already His
Crypto.com and Kraken’s actions get headlines because they involve high-profile transactions. EDX markets find almost nothing, even if it is a piece that makes the image acceptable. Citadel built EDX from the ground up in 2023 with Fidelity Digital Assets and Charles Schwab specifically so that institutions can sell crypto through a structure that resembles the traditional plumbing of the market, and is stored and implemented separately from balancing orders. Three years later, the site is no longer a side project. Its April trust charter would allow it to store and operate large-scale transactions under direct government supervision, and its stablecoin-based funds target a foreign exchange market that turns about $27 billion a day. Citadel is buying third-party businesses while quietly upgrading its existing portfolio.
The same month Citadel told the SEC to Regulate DeFi as a Stock Exchange
On December 2, the Citadel he wrote in a filing with the SEC’s Crypto Task Force against the broad exemptions for fixed-income platforms that display US currency. The filing said that many DeFi protocols, along with their developers and funders, already meet the legal definition of an exchange or broker and should be regulated as such. It warned that allowing them to operate under lighter regulations would create, in the company’s words, two separate security regimes. Founder Uniswap and other DeFi advocates pushed back publicly within days, arguing that the mandate was less about business protection than keeping the volume of transactions within licensed intermediaries.
Time is consistent with everything else on the list. Each site Citadel bought this year, Crypto.com a trust charter application and derivatives charter, Kraken’s Wyoming charter, EDX itself pending a trust charter, acts as an authorized intermediary for the letter of the Citadel brand that tokenized securities must be issued to pass. An unlicensed DeFi protocol that would be legally equivalent to the same transaction without the license controls the amount of any value on the list.
What the Model Buys Citadel
None of this requires Citadel to control any exchange; His shares in Kraken and Crypto.com are both limited. What builds instead is the presence and knowledge in all areas that can carry tokenized-assets when the rules are in place, plus a seat at the table to create what the rules require. If Treasuries, equities, and derivatives need to be cleared through authorized banks and registered market makers, a company that has access to four institutions that have the ability to process these will begin any negotiation from a stronger position than a company that has none.
Unexamined Section of Thesis
The model is real, but it has not yet worked on paper. Kraken’s $20 billion valuation from November dropped to $13.3 billion by April after a second acquisition by Deutsche Börse, a drop of about one-third in five monthsmeaning that the price of Citadel’s Kraken is now cheaper than what you paid for it. Crypto.com’s $20 billion price tag was hit this week at a time when Bitcoin trades at around $64,000, still below half of the $126,000 peak in October 2025. A firm assembling infrastructure for tokenization has been making money for many years in a market that, at the moment, has moved a lot.
The SEC has not yet ruled on the trustworthiness of EDX or the main question Citadel’s December letter raised about how DeFi protocols should be distributed. Both picks will do more to determine whether this stack will pay off than anything released on Thursday.
