A total of 62 publicly traded companies objected to the tokenization of their shares by OKX and ICE.
The latest are aircraft manufacturer Boeing, Amsterdam-based AI infrastructure provider Nebius, and ServiceNow, a major enterprise software company.
Objections to stock tokenization pile up
Recall that early last month, reports emerged that crypto trading platform OKX and the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, had requested SEC approval to begin trading the tokenized shares of at least 63 companies listed on the NYSE.
This was after the agency introduced a temporary innovation exemption in September, which allowed certain platforms to offer secondary trading of tokenized U.S. stocks through liquidity pools and authorized market makers.
Some of the companies targeted by the OKXICE project included JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, beverage maker Coca-Cola and retail giant Walmart, and as of November 2, all of them, alongside 46 others, had filed objections to the plan.
According to journalist Eleanor Terrett, some of the transmitters were worried on how their stock price and liquidity could be affected by tokenization. Others, she explained, have taken a wait-and-see stance, with issues around shareholder rights and market transparency, as well as OKX’s domiciliation abroad, coming to the forefront.
By November 3, the number of opponents had grown to 56, with Wall Street heavyweights such as Tesla and its sister company SpaceX, Amazon, SoFi Technologies and streaming giant Netflix also saying no to the idea.
It didn’t stop there. Yesterday, Terrett noted that energy equipment maker GE Vernova, Apple and Home Depot also had objected to third-party tokenization of their shares, meaning six members of the group of dominant, large-market-cap technology and growth companies, known as the “magnificent seven,” had said no.
Today’s announcements from Nebius, Boeing and ServiceNow bring the total number of companies that were originally on the OKXICE tokenization list to 54 and have refused to play ball, and eight more that had not been included have preemptively withdrawn, at do it 62.
Critics question whether OKXICE can work
When the top 50 companies withdrew, Mike Cagney, CEO of Figure interviewed the suitability of the OKXICE site, arguing that this would make execution worse since an automated market maker, which evaluates trades from a pool of funds, cannot match orders in the same way that a limit order book could.
“We’re going to have to do more than this SEC sandbox to get shares on public blockchains,” he wrote on
Meanwhile, Morgan Stanley has taken a different route, recently announcing that it has tokenized U.S. stocks and Treasuries through the services of the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC), which went live on October 28. It opened with 34 securities, each token backed 1-to-1 by an asset held in custody.
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