Wells Fargo, Intuit, and Arm Holdings are among six companies newly objecting to the tokenization of their shares, according to regulatory documents obtained by Reuters. The objections bring the total number of corporations blocking the effort to 22, up from 16 earlier in the week.
The dispute centers on OKXICE, a joint venture between cryptocurrency exchange OKX and Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange. The venture seeks to offer blockchain-based representations of conventional shares that can be traded 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
The venture initially proposed tokenizing shares of 63 stocks through a regulatory framework introduced by the Securities and Exchange Commission in September. The temporary exemption allows qualifying platforms to operate without meeting certain requirements imposed on traditional stock exchanges. However, the framework includes a safeguard requiring publicly traded companies to receive advance notice before their shares are tokenized and permitting them to formally object to block such offerings.
Previous objections came from Microsoft, Google parent Alphabet, Goldman Sachs, Qualcomm, Caterpillar, McDonald's, Western Digital, Broadcom, Verizon, UnitedHealth Group, CoreWeave, Rocket Lab, AppLovin, Cerebras Systems, Applied Digital, and Applied Optoelectronics.
Under OKXICE's proposed system, tokenized stocks would be backed by actual shares held through a registered broker-dealer, with investors retaining corresponding dividend and voting rights. Trading would take place through permissioned Uniswap v4 liquidity pools on OKX's X Layer blockchain using stablecoins for settlement.
Former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who sits on OKX's board and co-chairs the OKXICE venture, characterized the SEC's regulatory approach as an experiment. Cuomo stated that some companies would embrace tokenization while others would prefer to observe its development, and questioned why American securities markets should remain restricted to conventional trading hours given increasing international investor activity.
The expanding objections underscore a challenge for the tokenized securities industry: regulatory permission and technological capability alone may not be sufficient to convince corporations to participate in the new system.
