Last summer, Haider Rafique flew out to Atlanta to meet with the chairman of the company that owns the New York Stock Exchange. What was supposed to be a 30-minute chat turned into a four-hour marathon conversation, recalled Rafique, the global managing partner of corporate affairs at OKX, one of the world’s largest crypto exchanges.
“There was great chemistry in how we looked at the world and the future of tokenized securities, how derivatives should make it to the global stage, how TradFi [and] digital assets should merge together,” said Rafique, referring to his initial sit down with Jeffrey Sprecher, the chairman of Intercontinental Exchange.
In an interview, Blaugrund declined to give more specifics on how his company was building a blockchain-based trading platform. That initiative and the plan to let OKX users trade tokenized stocks are “complementary projects, but they’re not a single project,” he said.
And Rafique hopes that that plan isn’t the last time OKX works with Intercontinental Exchange, or ICE. “We’re a three-letter company. They’re a three-letter company,” he said. “And my aspiration is that maybe there’s a much bigger relationship.”
See you tomorrow,
Correction, March 5, 2026: Clarified Jeffrey Sprecher’s role in connection to the New York Stock Exchange.
