Sixty-three U.S. stocks are set to go on-chain. Nine companies went out of their way to say no. The other fifty-four didn’t say a word. The rules say silence counts as consent. It’s that simple.
The venture is called OKXICE, a joint venture between OKX and Intercontinental Exchange, the parent company of the NYSE. On October 4, it filed to list sixty-three stocks. An updated notice on the 15th said nine companies had submitted objections. Broadcom, Verizon, UnitedHealth, CoreWeave, Rocket Lab, and AppLovin were among them, along with a company that makes optical transceivers. Nine stocks—14 percent of the planned lineup. It hasn’t even launched yet, and there’s already an empty spot on the shelf.
The rule comes from the SEC’s innovation exemption issued last month. If a third party wants to use your stock to create a token, it has to notify you 30 days in advance. You have 30 days to object. If you do, the platform can’t list your stock. If you say nothing, it goes ahead. It sounds like they’re asking for your opinion, but in practice, silence means approval.
Why did those nine companies object? A spokesperson for Applied Optoelectronics, the optical transceiver maker, told The Wall Street Journal they weren’t sure how tokenization might affect their stock price, liquidity, or volatility, and didn’t want investors to mistakenly think the company had endorsed the offering. The other eight didn’t respond to reporters at all. Not a word. Nasdaq was even more direct: its FAQ on its own website says it doesn’t intend to let its stock be tokenized.
Something doesn’t quite add up. Really. Buying and selling stocks on the secondary market has never required the issuer’s approval of where they trade. Tokenization changes that default. The same stock, put on-chain, can trade 24 hours a day, even after hours. It looks as if the company has been copied—but did anyone ask it?
A lot of people think stocks going on-chain are held up by the technology, or by regulators not giving the green light. But both hurdles have been cleared. The real sticking point is something else: whether a company is willing to let its stock trade somewhere it can’t control, using a settlement method it doesn’t recognize, at prices it can’t see. The old rules of the primary market haven’t carried over. Nothing has changed. They’re two different things.
If you’ve bought this kind of thing on-chain, think about what you actually hold. The stock sits in a brokerage account; the token is just a claim ticket. Whether that ticket can be redeemed depends only on the custodian, not the publicly traded company.
My guess is that tokenized stocks will first emerge from the group of companies that don’t object. Once trading volume on the platform is big enough to matter, the major companies will come in on their own. At this stage, objecting costs nothing—and lets them stake out a position early.
No one knows whether more of those fifty-four companies will submit objections during the 30-day window. OKXICE hasn’t announced a launch date, either.
$USDC $USDT $OKB
#RWA #TokenizedStocks
The venture is called OKXICE, a joint venture between OKX and Intercontinental Exchange, the parent company of the NYSE. On October 4, it filed to list sixty-three stocks. An updated notice on the 15th said nine companies had submitted objections. Broadcom, Verizon, UnitedHealth, CoreWeave, Rocket Lab, and AppLovin were among them, along with a company that makes optical transceivers. Nine stocks—14 percent of the planned lineup. It hasn’t even launched yet, and there’s already an empty spot on the shelf.
The rule comes from the SEC’s innovation exemption issued last month. If a third party wants to use your stock to create a token, it has to notify you 30 days in advance. You have 30 days to object. If you do, the platform can’t list your stock. If you say nothing, it goes ahead. It sounds like they’re asking for your opinion, but in practice, silence means approval.
Why did those nine companies object? A spokesperson for Applied Optoelectronics, the optical transceiver maker, told The Wall Street Journal they weren’t sure how tokenization might affect their stock price, liquidity, or volatility, and didn’t want investors to mistakenly think the company had endorsed the offering. The other eight didn’t respond to reporters at all. Not a word. Nasdaq was even more direct: its FAQ on its own website says it doesn’t intend to let its stock be tokenized.
Something doesn’t quite add up. Really. Buying and selling stocks on the secondary market has never required the issuer’s approval of where they trade. Tokenization changes that default. The same stock, put on-chain, can trade 24 hours a day, even after hours. It looks as if the company has been copied—but did anyone ask it?
A lot of people think stocks going on-chain are held up by the technology, or by regulators not giving the green light. But both hurdles have been cleared. The real sticking point is something else: whether a company is willing to let its stock trade somewhere it can’t control, using a settlement method it doesn’t recognize, at prices it can’t see. The old rules of the primary market haven’t carried over. Nothing has changed. They’re two different things.
If you’ve bought this kind of thing on-chain, think about what you actually hold. The stock sits in a brokerage account; the token is just a claim ticket. Whether that ticket can be redeemed depends only on the custodian, not the publicly traded company.
My guess is that tokenized stocks will first emerge from the group of companies that don’t object. Once trading volume on the platform is big enough to matter, the major companies will come in on their own. At this stage, objecting costs nothing—and lets them stake out a position early.
No one knows whether more of those fifty-four companies will submit objections during the 30-day window. OKXICE hasn’t announced a launch date, either.
$USDC $USDT $OKB
#RWA #TokenizedStocks