Nine publicly companies have submitted formal objections to OKXICE's plans to offer tokenized versions of their shares, according to an Oct. 15 public notice from OKXICE, the joint venture between cryptocurrency exchange OKX and Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange. The Wall Street Journal first reported the news.

The filing names nine companies that submitted formal notices of issuer objection:

• Cerebras Systems (CBRS)
• Applovin (APP)
• Applied Digital (APLD)
• Rocket Lab (RKLB)
• Coreweave (CRWV)
• Verizon (VZ)
• Applied Optoelectronics (AAOI)
• Broadcom (AVGO)
• Unitedhealth Group (UNH)

The objections mark an intriguing turn for a venture seeking to bring traditional Wall Street shares onto blockchain infrastructure, where tokenization refers to representing assets such as publicly traded shares as digital tokens that can be held and transferred on-chain. The companies are not necessarily opposing blockchain technology itself, but their formal objections place them at odds with this particular tokenized stock arrangement.

Why the Objections Matter

OKXICE plans to let investors trade digital versions of U.S. stocks 24 hours a day, seven days a week, rather than being restricted to conventional stock market hours. Under the proposed arrangement, an independent third party would hold the actual company shares through a registered broker-dealer. Each digital token would represent an entitlement to one underlying share, including associated dividend and voting rights.

There is, however, a wrinkle in the works. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's temporary exemption includes an issuer objection mechanism, under which companies can object to having their shares tokenized by an unaffiliated third party, potentially preventing those securities from entering the venue's trading pools. That makes the nine objections more than symbolic: they create a practical obstacle for OKXICE's planned offerings, and they give issuers a formal say over whether their shares can be tokenized for the venue — a say issuers do not have over ordinary secondary-market trades on a registered exchange.

Wall Street's Tokenization Experiment Hits Resistance

The venture, owned equally by ICE and OKC USA Holding Inc., outlined its trading model earlier this month. Instead of a conventional stock exchange order book, OKXICE intends to use permissioned Uniswap v4 liquidity pools — access-restricted versions of the pools used on Uniswap, a widely used decentralized exchange protocol — on OKX's X Layer blockchain. Investors would trade tokenized shares against dollar-pegged stablecoins, including USDC, USDT, and USDG.

Participation requires identity verification and an approved digital wallet, while the platform operates under temporary SEC exemptive relief rather than conventional exchange registration.

The Oct. 15 notice does not explain why the nine issuers objected, nor does it establish that they oppose tokenization generally. Still, the dispute exposes a potentially awkward reality for Wall Street's blockchain ambitions: technology can make shares tradable around the clock, and regulators can create a pathway for doing so, but the companies behind those shares can still raise objections of their own. The open questions from here are procedural: whether OKXICE's trading pools take shape without the nine named companies' shares, and whether additional issuers file objections of their own under the same mechanism.