Microsoft, Google, Goldman Sachs and 16 other companies collectively said no! OKXICE hard push, Nasdaq withdraws: the first battle of tokenized stocks

Original author：WEB3AI

Original source：https://www.youtube.com/embed/LfE_J-D3mWY

If you thought stock tokenization was just a concept being played around by the crypto community, what happens in October 2026 may make you think again. OKXICE is a 50/50 joint venture platform owned by Intercontinental Exchange, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange. TSV, under the SEC innovation exemption framework, is preparing to turn a batch of U.S. stocks into on-chain tokens for 24/7 trading. As a result, an update notice on October 19 showed that the number of U.S. listed companies that objected to their stocks being tokenized trading increased from 9 to 16. Microsoft, Google parent company Alphabet, Goldman Sachs, Qualcomm, Caterpillar, McDonald's, and Western Digital have all joined the list. Companies such as Broadcom, Verizon, UnitedHealth, and CoreWeave have already raised objections. OKX-ICE co-chairman and former New York Governor Cuomo said this was a "very natural reaction" because the system inherently allows companies to choose to join or exit. The SEC's exemption sets a cap on the number of participants and transaction volume, which is essentially a sandbox experiment. But what’s really interesting about this is not that the 16 companies said “no,” but what they were objecting to. Applied Optoelectronics is one of the few companies that has publicly given its reasons. It said it is not sure about the impact of tokenization on stock prices, liquidity and volatility, and is also worried that investors will regard tokens issued by third parties as products endorsed by the company itself. Behind this is a deeper issue than "agreeing to go on-chain": the legal essence of tokenized stocks, is it a record of ownership of real stocks, a contractual claim against the custodian, or just a layer of price exposure. Galaxy’s head of research pointed out after the introduction of the SEC’s new regulations that packaged securities that only provide price exposure do not qualify for exemptions, and Robinhood’s early products are legally tokenized debt securities and do not confer legal or beneficial ownership of the underlying company. At the same time, although Nasdaq does not appear on the list of these 16 companies, it clearly removed its stocks from the TSV track as early as September 29 in the issuer guidance. The reason is very specific: it does not want its stocks to be traded in a venue that does not display the best price in real time and does not report transactions to the consolidated market band. The transaction in the tokenized venue is delayed by ten minutes and is not subject to Regulation NMS, which may form a "shadow market" with disjointed pricing. The IMF also gave data in its October report: more than half of tokenized stock transactions occurred outside the regular hours of the U.S. stock market, about 80% of the transaction size was less than one share, the realized volatility was about 1.5 times that of the traditional market, and the liquidity was significantly lower. But on the other hand, data from DWF Labs shows that the total market value of tokenized stocks reached US$3.8 billion in early October, an increase of 483% from US$654 million at the beginning of the year. The weekly DEX spot trading volume climbed from US$45.8 million to US$2.54 billion. On-chain use is indeed growing. So this is not a story about "traditional finance does not understand new technologies", but a stress test about who defines stocks as a legal and governance tool in an on-chain environment. The SEC has set the upper limit on the on-chain trading volume of a single security at 0.25% of the average daily trading volume, indicating that the regulators themselves understand that the purpose of the sandbox is to allow the mechanism to expose problems under controllable conditions, rather than to allow a high-volatility, thin-liquidity market to gain enough volume to feed back to the traditional market at an early stage. For ordinary investors, the most practical inspiration is: when you buy a token linked to the price of a certain stock on the chain, what exactly are you buying, does it have voting rights, how are dividends transmitted, and what bankruptcy isolation rules are subject to the issuer? These questions are usually answered by default in the backend of traditional brokerage accounts, but in a tokenized environment they need to be proactively asked.