Major U.S.-listed companies have stepped in to put the brakes on a tokenised stock trading platform being pursued by OKX and Intercontinental Exchange (ICE).

On Oct. 19, blockchain media outlet Decrypt reported that nine listed companies including Verizon, Broadcom and UnitedHealth Group objected to their shares being traded on the OKX-ICE tokenised stock trading platform.

The platform is a tokenised stock market being prepared jointly by crypto exchange OKX and ICE, the parent of the New York Stock Exchange. The companies raising objections also included Cerebras Systems, AppLovin, Applied Digital, Rocket Lab, CoreWeave and Applied Optoelectronics. The notice did not specify why each company opposed the plan or whether the objections would lead to the shares being excluded from trading.

The market is also watching Nasdaq's response. Nasdaq is not on the list of nine companies, but said it would exclude its shares from the scope of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's (SEC) innovation exemption. A Nasdaq spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal that it does not want its shares traded on an exchange that "does not provide the best real-time pricing or report trading information to the consolidated tape." Nasdaq received SEC approval earlier this year for its own tokenised securities pilot project.

The issue is seen as the first major test of the innovation exemption introduced by the SEC in September. The programme allows platforms meeting certain requirements to trade tokenised U.S. shares without registering as a formal exchange. The SEC presented a separate institutional framework after discussions in the Senate over the Clarity bill became deadlocked.

OKX-ICE plans to support 24-hour trading by building Uniswap v4 liquidity pools on OKX's X Layer blockchain. Settlement will use stablecoins including USDC and USDT. Rather than listed companies issuing tokens directly, a third party will issue them. The issuer is designed to hold the underlying shares on a one-to-one basis through a registered broker-dealer and to provide token holders with the same dividends and voting rights as ordinary shareholders.

There are also constraints investors must bear. The notice says OKX-ICE is not an SEC-registered exchange and is not subject to Regulation NMS, a set of rules aimed at modernising the U.S. stock market and strengthening fairness and transparency. It also has no obligation to ensure fair access for all participants. Trading volume is limited to a small fraction of a stock's usual volume, and operators can upgrade the platform's smart contracts without prior notice.

The structure shows tokenised stocks can be traded under a different regulatory and market operating system from existing stock markets. That is why listed companies and exchange operators respond sensitively to price discovery and trade disclosure systems. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) recently assessed that tokenised stocks show "real demand" even outside traditional market trading hours, but warned of high volatility and low liquidity.

A key issue will be whether corporate opposition leads to a reduced list of shares available for trading and whether the SEC's innovation exemption can operate without conflicting with existing stock market rules. The platform, which promotes 24-hour on-chain share trading, is facing issuers' consent and market infrastructure issues even before launch.