OKX and NYSE Owner ICE Set November 23 Launch for 24/7 Tokenized Stock Trading as Big Companies Opt Out

The joint venture between crypto exchange OKX and Intercontinental Exchange, the parent of the New York Stock Exchange, will open its blockchain-based stock trading venue on November 23. OKXICE said on Wednesday that trading will start at 9 a.m. ET and run around the clock.

More than 70 assets have been confirmed so far, including tokenized shares of Coinbase, Circle, Robinhood and Strategy, plus 59 exchange-traded funds from Direxion. A spokesperson told CoinDesk that not all of them will be available on day one.

The lineup is a long way from the one the venture first proposed. Most of the big names it hoped to list, from Apple to Nvidia, used their right to say no.

What OKXICE announced

According to the announcement, as reported by CoinDesk, Unchained and Reuters, the confirmed issuers include Better.com, BitGo, Circle, Coinbase, Robinhood, Securitize and Strategy. Strategy will list both its common stock and its preferred shares.

Direxion, an asset manager that CoinDesk says oversees $70 billion, is bringing 59 of its ETFs. "Our mission has always been to give investors precise tools, delivered in the way they want to use them. As trading behavior evolves, so do we," Direxion CEO Douglas Yones said.

Strategy CEO Phong Le called tokenization on the venue "a natural next step" for the company's stocks, such as its STRC preferred shares, according to Unchained.

Andrew Cuomo, the former New York governor who co-chairs OKXICE with Trabue Bland, pitched the launch as a national opportunity. "The SEC has created a real opening for American markets to lead the next era of finance," he said in the statement quoted by CoinDesk.

How trading on the venue will work

OKXICE will not run an order book. Trades go through automated market maker pools on Uniswap v4, deployed on X Layer, OKX's Ethereum layer-2 network, where software prices each trade against a pool of assets instead of matching buyers and sellers.

The venue's October 23 public notice says each tokenized stock trades in a pair with a payment stablecoin, giving USDC and USDG as examples. Only wallets holding a soulbound token issued by the venue can trade or add liquidity, and the venue has no governance token.

Securitize provides the tokenization layer. Each token is a "security entitlement" backed one-for-one by a U.S. share, Unchained reported, citing the venture's November 5 notice, and holders keep rights such as dividends, voting and taking part in corporate actions.

Custody stays with the customer. The tokens sit in users' own wallets, and OKXICE said it will not hold their assets or private keys.

Access is narrow at the start. Only eligible U.S.-based customers of OKX Inc. who pass identity checks, set up the required OKX wallet and onboard with OKXICE can take part.

Most big companies said no

The rules behind the venue give issuers a veto. Under the SEC's framework, when an unaffiliated third party arranges the tokenization, the company behind the stock gets written notice and 30 calendar days to object.

Many did. Of the 62 companies on OKXICE's original list, 56, or about 90%, objected, according to a CoinDesk tally. Total objections reached 67 including firms outside that list, with Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, Tesla and JPMorgan Chase among them.

Unchained said the venture's own November 5 notice also named Meta and Goldman Sachs among the 67 objectors. Reuters described the pushback as more than a dozen major U.S. companies objecting.

CoinDesk noted that the objections point to caution about trading outside the familiar market structure, not necessarily opposition to tokenization itself. The result is a starting lineup concentrated in companies already tied to digital assets.

Why it matters

This is the owner of the NYSE putting its name on 24/7 onchain stock trading in the United States. ICE and OKX formed the joint venture in June, after ICE invested in OKX at a $25 billion valuation in March, Unchained reported.

It is also a test of the SEC's new approach. The venue runs under the innovation exemption, a five-year order issued on September 17 that lets such venues trade tokenized stocks without registering as exchanges. We covered that decision when the SEC opened its five-year sandbox for tokenized U.S. stocks.

Reuters noted that the SEC rolled out the exemptions days after the Senate failed to advance comprehensive crypto legislation. CoinDesk said OKXICE will be the second venue to start trading under the experiment.

The industry pitch is simple: shares that trade at any hour and settle instantly, with more liquidity and lower costs. "The future of tokenized stocks should be built on real shares, real shareholder rights and the protections investors expect," Securitize chairman and CEO Carlos Domingo said, as quoted by Reuters.

The NYSE side of the business has been circling this for a while. Back in September, Ava Labs said the NYSE had spent a year testing Avalanche for its own tokenization push.

A busy day for tokenized stocks

OKXICE is not the only one moving. On the same day, Kraken parent Payward added more than 200 tokenized UK and European stocks to its xStocks platform, including all 40 companies in Germany's DAX index, CoinDesk and The Block reported.

Payward said xStocks now spans more than 1,500 assets, holds over $1.1 billion and has handled more than $45 billion in total volume. The model is different, though: CoinDesk describes xStocks as share-backed certificates that give price exposure without ownership, and they remain off limits to U.S. and UK investors.

That contrast is the selling point for OKXICE, which says its tokens carry real shareholder rights. For a listed crypto company like Coinbase, which only this week won a full federal trust bank charter, it is one more bridge between crypto and regulated finance.

What to watch next

The first date is November 23. Watch which of the 70-plus assets actually trade on opening day, since OKXICE has said not all of them will be ready.

The second is liquidity. With no order book, prices will depend on how much capital market makers and liquidity providers commit to the Uniswap v4 pools on X Layer.

The third is the objection list. If early trading runs smoothly, the venue will still need companies like Apple and Nvidia to change their minds before it can offer the broad lineup it first planned.

Until then, OKXICE starts as a U.S.-only, crypto-heavy market, but one with the owner of the New York Stock Exchange behind it.