OKX and Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the parent of the New York Stock Exchange, have filed a public notice with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to launch a venue for trading tokenized U.S. stocks. The Oct. 4 filing, from their 50-50 joint venture OKXICE LLC, proposes round-the-clock trading of blockchain-based shares in 63 U.S.-listed companies, each paired with a stablecoin. The venture is co-chaired by former New York governor Andrew Cuomo.
What OKXICE plans to trade
The notice describes a permissioned automated-market-maker system built on Uniswap v4 pools deployed on XLayer, OKX’s layer-2 network. Prices follow Uniswap’s constant-product formula, with no oracles or external feeds inside the smart contracts. Only wallets holding a soulbound token issued by OKXICE, after identity and sanctions screening, may trade or provide liquidity. Each tokenized share pairs with USDC, USDG, or USDT, and trading runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The proposed 63-stock lineup includes Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Tesla, and Coinbase, alongside smaller names such as USA Rare Earth and Applied Optoelectronics. Critical functions such as contract upgrades require multi-signature approval, while day-to-day operations use a separate administrative key.
Guardrails and what happens next
OKXICE will not operate an order book, hold customer assets, extend credit, or conduct primary offerings — the venue is limited to secondary-market trading. A registered broker-dealer acting as the “Tokenizer” must hold underlying shares one-for-one against outstanding tokens, and token holders keep the same dividend and voting rights as conventional shareholders. Issuers have 30 days to object to their shares being tokenized, and the notice already records one objection, from chipmaker Cerebras Systems. The SEC’s exemption caps Tier 1 venues at 75 symbols and 0.25% of prior-month average daily volume. OKXICE must also publish machine-readable transaction data within 10 minutes of each trade. Trading in a tokenized share also stops whenever the underlying stock halts on its primary exchange. Launch still hinges on remaining regulatory steps.
A growing bet on on-chain stocks
The filing relies on the SEC’s September Innovation Exemption, a five-year window for qualifying venues to trade tokenized NMS stocks. OKX and ICE formed the venture in June, months after ICE took a minority stake in the exchange. The move follows Blockchain.com’s earlier partnership with NYSE on tokenized securities, signaling how quickly Wall Street is moving its equities on-chain.
