Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko says U.S. public corporations must evolve alongside digital assets, arguing that any company unwilling to let its shares trade on-chain should withdraw from public markets altogether and go private.

His comments arrive as tokenized stock trading booms, yet a growing roster of household-name companies want no part of it. Tokenized stocks are blockchain-based representations of listed shares, a format that lets equities trade around the clock rather than only during the fixed hours of traditional exchanges. Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Caterpillar, McDonald's, Apple, Western Digital, and Alphabet are among the firms that have declined to have their equities tokenized on OKXICE, the joint venture between crypto exchange OKX and Intercontinental Exchange, the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, that filed with the SEC in October to launch a tokenized trading platform, as reported by Reuters.

More Than 30 Companies Object to OKXICE

About 33 major public companies are drawing a hard line against crypto-native stock trading. Heavyweights from Wells Fargo, Coca-Cola, and JPMorgan to technology names such as Dell, Advanced Micro Devices, Intel, AppLovin, and CoreWeave are opting out of the OKXICE Tokenized Securities Venue (TSV).

The objections stem from the SEC's Innovation Exemption Order, enacted in September, which formally requires tokenized securities venues to give advance notice to unaffiliated issuers. As set out in OKXICE's public notice, companies have 30 days to raise a written objection to trading on a specific platform.

According to Dave Hendricks, CEO of SEC-registered digital transfer agent Vertalo, the current wave of objections shows the regulatory guardrails are functional. He explained that the 30-day window was explicitly engineered by the SEC to preserve issuer agency, and corporations are actively exercising that right.

The exemption provides a limited framework for testing tokenized securities but does not eliminate all regulatory requirements. Its five-year lifespan gives market participants a chance to test blockchain-based trading under the new rules. The issuer objection mechanism, however, remains a major obstacle for venues seeking to list U.S. stocks: even if investors want access to a company's tokenized shares, a platform cannot proceed under this framework if the issuer objects.

Most firms have yet to disclose their reasons for opposing OKXICE. Mirza Uddin, chief operating officer of Injective, said companies like Goldman Sachs and Microsoft see more problems than benefits in a token beyond their control, especially one that operates around the clock with ambiguous voting rights. The industry, he maintained, needs to convince issuers that tokenization offers real advantages; without that, progress will continue outside the U.S. while regulators debate whether to allow it.

ClearStreet analyst Owen Lau similarly said companies do not yet see the full value of tokenization, though he anticipates eventual corporate adoption. "Some companies will say yes or will not object to this because of the benefits … the expanded investor base, 24/7 [access], increased distribution channel. Some of the beaten-down stocks with low trading volume could be good candidates," he said.

Carlos Domingo, CEO of tokenization company Securitise, argued that issuers' concerns are justified, calling it natural for corporations to worry about pricing, investor protection, and shareholders' rights in these new markets. "There's an important education process underway, and issuers should understand that they have different options for participating in tokenization, including issuer-sponsored approaches," he said. In an issuer-sponsored model, a company itself directs how its shares are tokenized rather than an unaffiliated venue doing so without its consent.

OKXICE, for its part, has characterized the opt-outs as expected. Its co-chairman, former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, has said the venture anticipated many companies would watch and wait until the initiative progressed further.

OKXICE is not the only applicant. TSV LLC and Perpetuals.com have also submitted notices of intent to launch blockchain-based Tokenized Securities Venues (TSVs) under the U.S. SEC Innovation Exemption.

Tokenized Equity Volume Hits $11.31 Billion on Robinhood Chain

Yakovenko's view is that firms should embrace both the advantages of a public listing and the obligations that come with it, and that opposing how their stocks are traded contradicts the decision to list them. In his assessment, the issuer objections do not signal a problem with tokenization itself; issuers simply want the benefits of listing without accepting the changes that come with an evolving trading system.

Corporate resistance has done little to curb investor enthusiasm. Tokenized equity trading volume on Robinhood Chain grew from $526 million in July to $2.21 billion in August, then surged to $11.31 billion in September. Non-crypto markets accounted for 36.5% of Hyperliquid's perpetuals volume in the quarter, up from 32.7% a quarter earlier, while tokenized stocks recorded the fastest growth among asset categories on Solana.

The widening divide raises questions about whether traditional companies will eventually embrace blockchain-based trading or continue to restrict unaffiliated platforms from offering tokens linked to their shares. The crypto industry broadly calls for open financial markets, and Yakovenko's remarks suggest it will likely be a long time before tokenization platforms can address issuers' concerns about shareholder rights, market oversight, and investor protection.