OKXICE, a joint venture between Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), and crypto-asset exchange OKX, announced an operating plan for a tokenized U.S. stock trading platform on October 4 local time. The plan would use temporary, conditional exemptive relief issued by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on September 17 to enable existing listed shares to trade in tokenized form.
Trading is expected to take place through Uniswap v4 automated market maker (AMM) liquidity pools built on OKX's XLayer blockchain. XLayer itself is a public, permissionless blockchain, but only approved wallets will be able to access the trading pools. Tokenized shares will be exchanged against settlement stablecoins such as USDC, USDG, and USDT, while the platform will neither operate an order book nor directly custody users' assets.
Both individual and institutional investors may participate, subject to identity verification, anti-money-laundering and sanctions screening, confirmation of wallet control, and account approval by the tokenization provider. Approved wallets will receive a non-transferable verification token. Smart contracts will check that token before permitting trading or liquidity provision.
The notice lists 63 planned trading instruments, including Nvidia, Tesla, Microsoft, and Micron. Shares tokenized by a third party unaffiliated with the issuer may begin trading only after at least 30 days have passed since the underlying share issuer received notice of the planned trading. If the issuer submits a written objection during that period, the tokenized shares cannot be offered for trading. The notice states that Cerebras Systems has already filed an objection.
The SEC relief allows qualifying platforms and certain liquidity providers to perform these functions without registering as an exchange or dealer, respectively; it does not constitute individual approval of the platform. The relief also requires token holders to receive the same rights as holders of the underlying shares, including dividend and voting rights. The OKXICE notice does not specify a launch date for trading.