OKX has suffered another big blow to its grand aspirations of tokenizing stocks after Tesla, Amazon, and four other big names turned down plans for the tokenization of their shares on the cryptocurrency exchange’s joint venture with New York Stock Exchange owner Intercontinental Exchange (ICE).
Six new companies have raised objections to their shares being tokenized on the OKXICE platform.
Among the new objectors are Elon Musk’s Tesla and SpaceX, e-commerce giant Amazon, streaming giant Netflix, semiconductor equipment maker Lam Research and fintech firm SoFi Technologies.
The new objections bring the total number of companies that have objected to the initiative to 56, further damaging OKX’s push into the realm of traditional finance.
In particular, five of the Magnificent Seven tech companies have turned down the proposal to have their stocks tokenized on the OKXICE platform. These include Tesla, Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet and Nvidia.
Almost 80% of targeted companies oppose OKX plan
What makes this rejection even more noteworthy is that the total number of targeted companies involved in this OKXICE joint venture is relatively low.
Back in early October, OKX and ICE announced their plan to offer tokenized versions of 62 major companies’ stocks.
However, 49 out of those 62 companies have formally opposed the proposal. Hence, about 79% of the initially targeted companies have rejected the plan. The other seven objections came from companies not in the initial selection.
Some of the most famous names in American finance and tech, including JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Walmart, Coca-Cola, Intel, Oracle, AMD, Nike and Costco, have also expressed their objections.
As of the Nov. 2 notice, only 13 out of the original selection had yet to raise a publicly disclosed objection.
These names include Apple, Coinbase, Robinhood, Strategy, Circle and Palantir.
However, the fact that they have not raised a formal objection doesn’t necessarily mean they approve of the tokenization plan.
It is worth noting that Nov. 3 marks the end of the 30-day objection period for the companies that received their initial notice on Oct. 4.
Nonetheless, with almost four-fifths of the initially targeted companies raising objections, OKXICE faces an uphill battle to get sufficient corporate involvement to make its tokenized stock market appealing to investors.
OKXICE has not set a definite launch date yet. It also has not disclosed the number of tokenized stocks it will offer when it starts trading.
