Twelve more companies filed notices of issuer objection in the venue's October 30 notice, which bars it from listing tokenized versions of their shares. By CoinDesk's tally 43 of the 62 companies OKXICE picked in its October 4 filing have now objected, days before the start that filing's 30-day notice period pointed to.
Nvidia, Costco and Nike are among 12 companies that have filed notices of issuer objection against OKXICE, the tokenized stock venue owned jointly by Intercontinental Exchange and OKX, taking the number of companies blocking it from 38 to 50 in the venue's own public notice dated October 30.
The objections work through the exemptive order the Securities and Exchange Commission issued on September 17, which created a category it calls a Tokenized Securities Venue and freed those venues from registering as exchanges. Before a venue can offer a tokenized version of a company's stock arranged by an unaffiliated third party, it has to give that company written notice. The company then has 30 calendar days to object in writing, and a timely objection stops the venue listing that stock. The objection reaches that venue only.
OKXICE told the Commission on October 4 that it intended to trade 63 symbols. Alphabet appeared twice on that list, as GOOGL and GOOG, so the 63 symbols covered 62 companies. By CoinDesk's tally of the October 30 notice, 43 of those 62 original picks are now among the objectors, about 69 percent, and the remaining seven objectors are companies OKXICE had not selected.
Nineteen of the original picks have not appeared on an objection list, among them Apple, Amazon, Tesla, Coinbase and Circle. CoinDesk noted that silence is not endorsement and does not mean a company's shares will be available when the venue opens. Securitize, which has itself put 12 US stocks on Solana as entitlements rather than shares, and BitGo both told CoinDesk they did not plan to object.
The count has climbed through successive notices. Nine companies had objected by October 15. Sixteen had objected by October 20, after a notice disclosed Microsoft, Alphabet, Goldman Sachs, Qualcomm, Caterpillar, McDonald's and Western Digital. The October 28 notice listed 38, with Walmart and Eli Lilly among the additions. The October 30 notice added CrowdStrike, Corning, Micron, IREN, USA Rare Earth, Bloom Energy, Nike, Nvidia, Palo Alto Networks, Costco, Reddit and Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
The exemptive order requires 30 calendar days of public notice before a venue begins operating, and OKXICE filed on October 4, which pointed to a start in early November rather than a date the Commission set. Issuers notified on October 4 reach the end of their own 30-day windows at about the same moment. A venue also has up to five business days to disclose an objection it has received, so the published list can lag the decisions behind it.
Andrew Cuomo, co-chairman of the joint venture, a former governor of New York and a member of OKX's board, addressed the objections on a press call on October 20, when 16 companies had objected. "This is a very natural response," he said, according to CoinDesk, and he added that the venture had expected many companies would want to wait and see how it goes rather than be the first to participate. The reports of the October 30 notice carry no statement from ICE or OKX.
Unchained, which read the notice, reported that the document states the venue "is not registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission." It says controls on maximal extractable value "substantially mitigate" that risk without eliminating it, that the token contract gating access to the venue "has been audited internally, but not by external auditors," and that whether self-custodied tokens would be covered by the Securities Investor Protection Corporation "is uncertain."
No objecting company has explained its decision. Nasdaq, which opted its own shares out, told The Wall Street Journal that it did not want its stock on a venue that does not display the best prices in real time or report trades to the consolidated tape, Decrypt reported. The notice acknowledges that the venue is not subject to Regulation NMS, the rules meant to ensure investors get the best displayed prices, and warns that broker-dealers face unsettled questions about trade reporting and best execution there.
Trades on the venue would run through permissioned Uniswap v4 pools on OKX's XLayer chain, paired against stablecoins such as USDC, with approved users able to trade around the clock. The stated appeal of a tokenized equity is trading when the listing venue is closed, and the International Monetary Fund found that most tokenized US stock trading already happens outside regular hours.
The exemptive order caps a venue at 75 Tier 1 symbols and at 0.25 percent of each symbol's prior-month average daily volume, limits that left OKXICE room when it listed 63. What the objections take away is not capacity but inventory. The venue can still open on notice, and most of the companies it picked have told it in writing that it cannot list their shares.
