A joint venture between crypto exchange OKX and Intercontinental Exchange, the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, has asked US regulators for the green light to trade tokenized shares of more than 60 US-listed companies around the clock, seven days a week. OKXICE LLC notified the Securities and Exchange Commission of the plan on Sunday, according to Bloomberg, making it one of the first exchanges to use the regulator’s new pathway for digital versions of public company shares on crypto-linked infrastructure.
The venue would run under the SEC’s innovation exemption, a framework that grants temporary, conditional relief to tokenized security venues from parts of the Exchange Act, and would settle trading on OKX’s X Layer blockchain. The structure gives issuers notice before their shares go live and a window to object, a guardrail that could put some companies in the awkward position of having their stock traded around the clock on a venue they never asked for, and away from them if they stay silent.
Tokenized stocks already trade heavily, but off the regulated path. Tokenized stock volume on decentralized exchanges reached $48.7 billion over the past year, up more than 10,000 percent year over year, with BNB Chain leading at $21.1 billion, and Securitize put tokenized Apple, Nvidia and Tesla shares on Solana this week with extended-hours trading. What OKXICE adds is the other rail: a permissioned, US-regulated venue with NYSE-affiliated governance behind it.
The shareholder-rights question at the center of every tokenized stock
Whether a tokenized wrapper carries ordinary shareholder rights is contested. Robinhood’s chief executive has argued publicly that issuers should control shareholder rights, not separate products that merely track publicly traded shares, in a dispute that started when AMC pushed back against tokenized proxies for its stock. That fight, over what a token actually entitles its holder to, is now the central governance test for every venue in this market.
Competition is arriving from another direction. Coinbase filed with the CFTC last month to list single-stock perpetual futures, aiming at leveraged exposure to stocks rather than direct ownership, and prediction-market operator Kalshi has moved toward offering its own version. Stablecoin issuers, brokerages and exchanges are all converging on the same settlement layer from different sides.
What OKXICE is proposing sits closer to full ownership than any of those. If ICE’s market-infrastructure record and OKX’s trading stack can deliver 24/7 on-chain equity settlement under an SEC exemption while satisfying shareholder rights and securities-law obligations, tokenized stocks stop being an offshore curiosity and become infrastructure. The question now is which issuers give consent, how dividend and voting mechanics get handled, and whether the SEC polices what happens outside the tokenized rails once they exist.
Grayscale has moved quietly on the same ground. A prospectus supplement filed with the SEC in early October lets authorized participants create and redeem shares of its XRP trust ETF in-kind, directly against the token rather than always through a cash leg, and adds Anchorage Digital Bank as a second custodian alongside Coinbase Custody. It is plumbing rather than a headline, but it points the same way: institutions wiring digital assets into the standard ETF settlement machinery, so tokenized wrappers on the front end connect to conventional systems on the back end.
The OKXICE filing lands in a quieter week for crypto prices, with bitcoin near $82,000 after spot ETF outflows ran several straight days, so the case for new trading infrastructure is being made against a market defensive about leverage and outflows. That cuts both ways. It sharpens the argument that regulated venues might reclaim activity happening offshore, and it raises the bar for proving real demand beyond what leverage already supports.
What comes next is procedure, not news. The SEC’s exemption framework invites comment rather than fast approval, issuers get their notice window, and exchanges will have to show custody, surveillance and settlement arrangements that satisfy both securities law and the platform’s own blockchain. Which companies make the first 60-name list, and whether any of them objects publicly, will tell the market more about politics than about technology.
Grayscale has moved quietly on the same ground. A prospectus supplement filed with the SEC in early October lets authorized participants create and redeem shares of its XRP trust ETF in-kind, directly against the token rather than always through a cash leg, and adds Anchorage Digital Bank as a second custodian alongside Coinbase Custody. It is plumbing rather than a headline, but it points the same way: institutions wiring digital assets into the standard ETF settlement machinery, so tokenized wrappers on the front end connect to conventional systems on the back end.
The OKXICE filing lands in a quieter week for crypto prices, with bitcoin near $82,000 after spot ETF outflows ran several straight days, so the case for new trading infrastructure is being made against a market defensive about leverage and outflows. That cuts both ways. It sharpens the argument that regulated venues might reclaim activity happening offshore, and it raises the bar for proving real demand beyond what leverage already supports.
What comes next is procedure, not news. The SEC’s exemption framework invites comment rather than fast approval, issuers get their notice window, and exchanges will have to show custody, surveillance and settlement arrangements that satisfy both securities law and the platform’s own blockchain. Which companies make the first 60-name list, and whether any of them objects publicly, will tell the market more about politics than about technology.