Walmart, the world's largest retailer, has objected to having its shares offered on OKXICE TSV, the planned tokenized stock venue backed by OKX and Intercontinental Exchange, according to an updated notice from the venue dated Wednesday, Oct. 28. Eli Lilly, Cigna Group, Carnival and Arcos Dorados joined the retailer in the latest round of objections.

The five additions bring the total to 38 companies, up from 33 a day earlier, when JPMorgan Chase, Coca-Cola and Dell were among seven newcomers. The tally has more than quadrupled since the venue's first list of nine objectors on Oct. 15. It grew to 16 on Oct. 19, with names including Microsoft, and reached 22 on Oct. 23, when Wells Fargo joined the list. The venue began publishing its objection lists earlier this month, and the count has risen steadily since.

The latest batch broadens the pushback beyond the tech and finance firms that dominated earlier rounds and into retail, health care and travel. Arcos Dorados, the largest McDonald's franchisee in Latin America, joins McDonald's itself, which objected earlier this month. Eli Lilly and Cigna join UnitedHealth Group and Moderna among the health care companies on the list.

The objections carry real weight. Under the SEC's innovation exemption, which the agency unveiled in September after the Clarity Act stalled in the Senate, a venue must notify a company before offering a version of its shares tokenized by an unaffiliated third party. A timely objection bars the venue from listing a third-party tokenized version of a company's stock. If the company objects in writing within 30 days, the venue cannot make that stock available for trading, according to the SEC's order. For the 38 companies named so far, the bar holds even once the venue is live. The objection applies only to that venue, and the notices do not disclose the companies' reasons — with no rationale offered, the rising count is the clearest public measure of issuer pushback to date.

OKXICE TSV, a 50-50 joint venture between NYSE owner Intercontinental Exchange and OKX's U.S. holding company, plans to let approved users trade tokenized U.S. stocks around the clock. OKX and ICE first teamed up on tokenized securities earlier this year before announcing the 24/7 venue this month.

Trades would run through permissioned Uniswap v4 pools on OKX's XLayer blockchain, paired with stablecoins such as USDC. The exemption caps the venue at 75 of the largest, most liquid stocks, with trading limited to 0.25% of each stock's average daily volume, and allows up to 250 other stocks at 2.5%. Those caps keep any included stock's venue-side activity to a small share of its normal trading volume, and the objection process lets issuers decline even that limited form of participation.

The list may not be finished. Under the SEC's order, companies have 30 days from receiving notice to object, and some of the market's most heavily traded names, including Nvidia, Tesla, Apple and Amazon, have not yet done so, leaving the door open for the list to keep growing. Until an objection arrives, those stocks stay eligible for the venue, making each notice update the key signal of what the eventual lineup will include.

The venue has also said it can list shares tokenized by the issuers themselves, which would give companies direct control over how their stock appears onchain, though the notices do not identify any such listings. That leaves issuers with a two-sided decision: bar third-party tokenized versions of their stock from this venue, or take the onchain listing into their own hands.

This article was first published by Decrypt.