Why Nine Wall Street Names Want Nothing to Do With OKXICE Tokens

• OKXICE tokens will not be offered for shares of nine U.S.-listed companies that objected.
• The SEC’s new framework lets issuers veto third-party tokens on a specific venue.
• Companies point to risks around liquidity, volatility and investor confusion.
• OKXICE can still move ahead with stocks whose issuers have stayed silent.

OKXICE tokens will not cover nine U.S.-listed companies, among them Broadcom, Verizon, UnitedHealth Group and CoreWeave, after they used a new opt-out right granted by the Securities and Exchange Commission to keep their shares off the tokenized stock venue that crypto exchange OKX runs jointly with New York Stock Exchange owner Intercontinental Exchange (ICE). The list appears in an updated public notice from the venture dated October 15, less than a month after the SEC opened a legal path for round-the-clock blockchain trading of U.S. equities, and it turns OKXICE into the first real test of how much control listed companies want over where digital copies of their stock change hands.

Three Batches of Refusals

The objections surfaced in three batches, starting with chipmaker Cerebras Systems, which was already named in OKXICE’s first notice on October 4 and never made it onto the venue’s list of 63 planned securities. AppLovin, Applied Digital and Rocket Lab followed in the October 8 update, while five more names, led by Broadcom, one of the most valuable chipmakers in the world, appeared on October 15. The dates reflect when OKXICE disclosed each objection, which may differ from when the companies actually filed them.

How the SEC’s 30-Day Veto Works

The right to object comes from the Innovation Exemption the SEC issued on September 17 under Release No. 34-106402, two days after the Senate failed to advance the CLARITY Act. The order lets qualifying tokenized securities venues match buyers and sellers of U.S.-listed stocks through permissioned liquidity pools without registering as national exchanges, and it runs until September 17, 2031.

When a token is created by a third party with no link to the company, the venue must send the issuer written notice, after which the company has 30 calendar days to object. A timely objection keeps that token off that venue, while silence lets trading proceed once the venue meets the order’s other conditions. Each refusal applies to OKXICE alone, so the same nine companies would receive a fresh notice, and a fresh choice, from any other venue that wants to list them. The order also requires tokens to carry the same rights as ordinary shares, caps each venue at 75 securities, limits trading volume and forces a halt whenever the underlying stock stops trading on its home exchange.

Why Some Issuers Say No

Most of the nine have not explained their decisions publicly. Applied Optoelectronics is the exception: a company spokeswoman said the manufacturer could not predict how tokenization would affect its share price, liquidity and volatility, and worried that investors might assume the company had approved or sponsored the tokens. In the company’s view, the possible benefits did not outweigh that uncertainty for its shareholders.

That worry comes from how the venue is built, since OKXICE will not run a traditional order book, the system where buy and sell orders meet at listed prices. OKXICE tokens will instead trade against a stablecoin in an automated pool whose formula sets the price, and the venture’s own notice warns that token prices may drift from the underlying shares, particularly outside regular trading hours. If news breaks on a Saturday, the pool becomes the only live market for that stock until Wall Street reopens on Monday and arbitrage traders can pull the two prices back together.

Nasdaq has raised a related objection and stated in its own investor FAQ that it intends to opt its shares out of tokenized securities venues, pointing to platforms that do not display the best available prices in real time or report trades to the consolidated tape, the feed that collects every U.S. stock transaction into one public record. The exchange operator is still working on its own tokenization projects alongside the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), the body that settles most U.S. securities trades, which suggests its concerns target the design of standalone trading venues.

What OKXICE Is Building

OKXICE is a 50-50 venture that grew out of ICE’s strategic investment in OKX in March, a deal that valued the exchange at $25 billion and gave ICE a seat on its board. Jeffrey Sprecher, ICE’s chair and CEO, said at the time that the partnership would speed up the group’s plans to bring on-chain infrastructure and tokenized assets to U.S. investors.

The venue will run on X Layer, OKX’s layer-2 network, using permissioned Uniswap v4 pools settled in USDC, USDT and USDG. Traders will need an approved wallet, identity and sanctions checks and a non-transferable access token, while each token is backed one-for-one by real shares that keep their dividend and voting rights. OKXICE will not hold customer assets or run primary offerings, and it has not announced a launch date.

Apple and Nvidia Are Still on the List

The objections remove eight names from OKXICE’s original 63, which leaves Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Tesla and JPMorgan Chase among the 55 stocks that have not opted out so far. That count may still fall, since some notification windows remain open. Competition is arriving at the same time: Nasdaq-listed Perpetuals.com, led by former FTX Europe head Patrick Gruhn, published its own notice on October 14 and has said trading could begin in mid-November, while Securitize opened tokenized stock trading to U.S. investors on October 8. Securitize president Brett Redfearn argued that a company rejecting one venue has not turned against tokenization as such. OKXICE co-chair Andrew Cuomo, the former governor of New York, said earlier this month that the venture expected some issuers to object.

The market these players are chasing has grown fast, with on-chain trackers putting the value of tokenized stocks at roughly $3.5 billion by mid-October against about $680 million at the start of 2026. The next decision may come from Washington, because the SEC has opened a public comment file asking whether the exemption should become permanent, and objections from companies the size of Broadcom and UnitedHealth give the agency its first hard evidence on whether an opt-out model protects issuers well enough or should require their consent upfront.