Tokenized Stocks Ring Up 22 Objections Ahead of Robinhood’s Bell

The number of companies objecting to having their shares tokenized on the OKX-ICE venue climbed from nine on October 15 to 16 on October 19 and 22 on October 23. That was a two-and-a-half-fold increase in eight days, covering 35% of the 63 companies the venue planned to list. Wells Fargo, Cisco, Marvell, Arm, Moderna and Intuit joined Microsoft, Alphabet, Goldman Sachs, Verizon, Broadcom and UnitedHealth in the objection list.

A full-page Wall Street Journal advertisement over the weekend read, “YOUR STOCK. THEIR TOKENS. YOUR PROBLEM,” and was paid for by the conservative nonprofit Common Sense Leadership Fund. The message was aimed at public company CEOs and listed eight risks: pricing disparities, obscured ownership, impaired capital raising, cybertheft, market manipulation, AML and KYC loopholes, absent investor protections and legal liability. The call to action said the SEC had given companies the right to opt out, that they had 30 days and that this was their only chance.

OKXICE amended its rules on October 19 to let issuers tokenize their own shares, handing them control over those listings. No objecting company had taken up the provision.

Robinhood Chain launched its public mainnet on July 1 and generated roughly $51 million in revenue in its debut quarter, more than Ethereum’s $41 million, while Ethereum’s own network revenue fell 35%. The chain processed about $65 billion in DEX volume, ranking fourth among all networks, of which $13.7 billion came from tokenized equities. That represented one fifth of everything trading on Robinhood Chain during the quarter, from a zero start.

Robinhood’s stock tokens have drawn criticism, with AMC’s CEO calling them “contemptible.” Long.xyz pairs memecoins against tokenized NVDA and TSLA, and meme-versus-stock pairs now drive most stock-token volume on the chain. Orbio funds AI inference credits with creator fees paid in tokenized NVDA. A Monday tweet from Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev came ahead of the third-quarter results, which are due after the bell, while the tokenized-stock dispute was described as a billion-dollar question.