Sixteen issuers opt out of the tokenised stock venue

Sixteen companies, among them Microsoft, Alphabet and Goldman Sachs, have objected to having tokenised versions of their shares traded on OKXICE, according to the venue's public notice dated Monday, 19 October. OKXICE is a joint venture, owned 50-50, of Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, and a holding company of the crypto exchange OKX. A tokenised stock is a blockchain token that represents one share held in custody.

The notice lists the objectors by name and ticker: Cerebras Systems, AppLovin, Applied Digital, Rocket Lab, CoreWeave, Verizon, Applied Optoelectronics, Broadcom, UnitedHealth, Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Caterpillar, McDonald's, Western Digital and Alphabet, whose two share classes are listed together. Seven of them are new since the previous week's notice, which showed nine, CoinDesk reported: Microsoft, Alphabet, Goldman Sachs, Qualcomm, Caterpillar, McDonald's and Western Digital.

The objections carry weight under the Securities and Exchange Commission's rules. The SEC's exemptive order of 17 September lets a "Tokenized Securities Venue" trade tokens of US-listed shares without registering as an exchange. When a third party rather than the company makes the tokens, the venue must notify the company and wait at least 30 days, and if the company objects in that time the stock cannot be listed, as Komposite reported when OKXICE published its first notice. OKXICE's notice says that no member of the venue or its affiliates tokenises any of the stocks; a third-party "Tokenizer" holds the shares one for one through a registered broker-dealer.

The venue's first notice, dated 4 October, listed 63 stocks. CoinDesk counts them as 63 tickers for 62 companies, with Alphabet appearing twice. Fifteen of those 62 have now objected, which leaves 47 without a disclosed objection, by our subtraction. The sixteenth objector, Cerebras, was not on the original list; it had objected by the time of the first notice.

The notice does not say why any company objected or when each objection arrived, and none of the companies is quoted in it or in CoinDesk's report. Companies have obvious reasons to be wary. The notice says the venue's prices are set by Uniswap liquidity pools on OKX's X Layer network, without reference to the market for the underlying share, and that holders' rights to dividends and votes rest on the tokenizer's representations. Whether those are the reasons in this case, the companies have not said.

The list reads as a cross-section of the large-cap market rather than a single sector: two of the biggest technology companies, a bank, a chipmaker, an industrial group, a restaurant chain and a health insurer, alongside several AI infrastructure names. The notice still gives no launch date.

The SEC's framework lets a venue list a company's shares without asking first and leaves it to the company to say no. Two weeks after the first notice, 16 have done so. The notice does not say when the companies were notified, so it is not clear how long the rest have left to object. Komposite has followed the tokenisation of US markets, including filings for perpetual futures on individual stocks and the race to accept tokenised collateral.