OKXICE, the joint venture between crypto exchange OKX and New York Stock Exchange owner Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), has told the SEC it intends to operate a tokenized securities venue around the clock, according to Decrypt. The notice was published on October 4 under the SEC’s “Innovation Exemption,” a path that has let qualifying venues trade tokenized stocks since September 17 without registering as exchanges.
Co-chair Andrew Cuomo, a former New York governor, said in a post on X that the filing was “a landmark step toward a truly global, 24/7 Wall Street.” Decrypt and Financemagnates both reported that no launch date was given. The SEC does not approve venues one by one; a firm that meets the exemption’s conditions notifies the agency and can then operate under it, subject to those conditions.
Also read: CLARITY Act Fails in Senate as SEC Backs Tokenized Stocks
Key facts
- OKXICE’s notice lists tokenized versions of more than 60 US-listed stocks, each paired with USDC, USDG or Tether’s USDT, and says the venue will run 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Financemagnates put the count at 63.
- The list includes Nvidia, Tesla, Apple, Microsoft and SpaceX, alongside crypto-linked firms Coinbase, Circle, Strategy, Robinhood, BitGo and Securitize; Financemagnates also names Goldman Sachs.
- Chipmaker Cerebras Systems has already lodged a notice of issuer objection with the venture, and it does not appear on the notice’s list. OKXICE does not name the firm issuing its tokens, described only as “the Tokenizer.”
- ICE and OKX formed the 50-50 venture in June, three months after ICE took a minority stake in OKX at a $25 billion valuation, and the pair had already brought crypto-native perpetual futures for oil to market for non-US customers.
- For the most liquid stocks, the notice caps a venue at 75 symbols and 0.25% of each stock’s average daily volume in the prior month, according to Financemagnates.
How the venue is built
Trades would run through permissioned Uniswap v4 liquidity pools on XLayer, a layer-2 blockchain, with a custom smart contract checking every transaction. Only wallets holding a non-transferable soulbound token, issued after identity, anti-money laundering and sanctions checks run by OKX’s US entity, can trade or supply liquidity. OKXICE itself will not run an order book or hold client assets, and the notices say it is not registered with the SEC in any capacity for this activity and sits outside Regulation NMS and the fair-access rules that bind exchanges.
Prices come only from the ratio of assets in each pool, with no outside market data fed into the smart contracts. The notice warns that tokenized prices may diverge from the underlying shares, particularly outside regular exchange hours. Holders are entitled to the same dividends and voting rights as ordinary shareholders, and the underlying shares are held one-for-one through a registered broker-dealer.
Also read: Blockchain.com expands tokenized stock offerings to over 430 as onchain equities market surges
Why it matters
The filing tests a regulatory route the SEC created on September 17, days after a comprehensive crypto market structure bill failed to advance in the Senate, with Chair Paul Atkins saying the agency was acting “within its statutory authority” and officials describing the exemption as a temporary bridge toward permanent rulemaking. It runs for five years. Chris Hayes, executive director of the Coalition for Tokenized Markets, told Crypto in America at the time that the exemption “could put DeFi trading platforms and liquidity pools in much more direct competition with traditional exchanges.”
Brokers already sell weekend and overnight exposure to US shares through CFDs. Exchange hours have been stretching too: Nasdaq filed in December for 23-hour weekday trading after NYSE’s approval for a 22-hour schedule, and the SEC approved a Nasdaq pilot in March in which tokenized shares trade in the same order book and under the same ticker as conventional ones, Financemagnates reported. Bruce Markets, backed by Robinhood and Fidelity, said last week it plans to extend its overnight US equity trading into Saturdays and Sundays through its alternative trading system.
What to watch
Neither report gives a launch date, and fees are to be published separately. Two open items stand out: whether other issuers follow Cerebras in objecting within the 30-day window the exemption provides, and whether the SEC moves the arrangement from temporary relief toward permanent rulemaking. Cuomo has worked with OKX since 2023.
Reported by decrypt.co.
Sources: Decrypt, Financemagnates, Cointelegraph