Tokenized stocks: Nvidia, Nike and Costco increase companies that say no to OKX-ICE to 50

Very closed club, increasingly short list. The tokenized stock platform set up by OKX and the owner of the NYSE was to offer 62 major American stocks for trading 24 hours a day. Fifty of them have now said no, compared to nine at the time of our first article on the corporate veto. Nvidia, Nike and Costco have just joined the list.

OKX-ICE: from 9 to 50 refusals in three weeks

The meter is racing. The public notice filed by OKXICE on October 19 listed 16 objections. There were 26 on October 26, 38 on the 28th, then 50 in the notice of October 30, revealed Sunday by journalist Eleanor Terrett. The newcomers weigh heavily: Nvidia, Nike, Costco, Micron, Reddit, CrowdStrike, Corning, Palo Alto Networks and HPE, according to crypto.news' count.

They join an already large first wave, with Microsoft, Alphabet, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, AMD, Intel and Walmart. Do the math. Of the 62 companies (63 symbols) initially planned, a dozen remain.

The mechanism explains the debacle. The temporary exemption granted by the SEC on September 17 gives each issuer 30 calendar days after notification to object. A timely objection is sufficient to prohibit the listing of the corresponding token. No need for litigation or lobbying.

Tokenized shares: why issuers are closing the door

The product nevertheless had something to seduce. Equity-backed tokens, traded 24 hours a day for USDC or USDG in Uniswap v4 pools on X Layer, the OKX blockchain. No order book, automatic exchange pools reserved for wallets equipped with an access token. And the sponsorship of ICE, parent company of the NYSE, which owns half of the joint venture.

Transmitters mostly see what they cannot control. A token that trades on Sunday at 3 a.m. creates a parallel price, outside official trading hours, without the company having chosen the platform or the blockchain. The exemption also caps volumes at 0.25% of the average daily volume of the previous month for the first level and 2.5% for the second.

The Nasdaq is playing its own game. He declined to comment on accusations that he encouraged refusals, but he is preparing an issuer-centric model, with Kraken, for the second quarter of 2027. In this scheme, it is the listed company which decides to tokenize its securities.

A platform under exemption that loses its reason for being

OKXICE specifies in its opinion that it does not itself issue tokenized securities and does not hold the assets of its clients. It therefore depends entirely on tokens issued by third parties, which listed companies can block one by one. Neither OKX nor ICE have publicly commented on the wave of refusals. The joint venture still operates under the SEC's temporary exemption, Stocktwits recalls.

For the European investor, nothing changes in the short term. Tokenized stocks remain accessible through other channels, and the NYSE has already opened the door to 44 million crypto accounts.