The owner of the New York Stock Exchange and OKX set out plans yesterday (Sunday) for a blockchain venue trading 63 US stocks around the clock. Their joint venture, OKXICE, published the notice a new Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) exemption requires before such a venue opens.
Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) and OKX each own 50% of the venture, which they announced in June as a route for OKX's retail clients into ICE futures and tokenized NYSE shares. The list runs from Nvidia, Tesla and Apple to SpaceX and Goldman Sachs.
London's trading industry is coming home!
Brokers already sell weekend and overnight exposure to US shares through CFDs. These tokens are backed one for one by stock held at a broker-dealer and carry the same dividend and voting rights.
Their scale is capped. For the most liquid stocks, a venue may list at most 75 symbols and trade no more than 0.25% of each stock's average daily volume in the prior month, the notice says.
Exchanges and Brokers Stretch US Trading Hours
Nasdaq filed in December for 23-hour weekday trading, following NYSE's approval for a 22-hour schedule.
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The SEC also approved a Nasdaq pilot in March in which tokenized shares trade in the same order book and under the same ticker as conventional ones.
Weekend access is coming from brokers too. 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.
Trades Would Run Through Permissioned Liquidity Pools
OKXICE will not run an order book or hold client assets. Participants would trade from their own wallets against Uniswap v4 pools on the XLayer blockchain , pairing each stock with the USDC, USDG or USDT stablecoins.
OKX's US arm runs identity and anti-money laundering checks. Approved wallets then receive a non-transferable token that the pools check before every trade.
Former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who co-chairs OKXICE, called the filing "a landmark step toward a truly global, 24/7 Wall Street" in a post on X.
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 token prices may drift from the underlying stock, particularly outside regular exchange hours or when a pool is thin.
Where a third party tokenizes the shares, it must buy them through a registered broker-dealer before minting. The SEC opened this route on September 17 on condition that tokens carry full shareholder rights.
Five-Year Relief Instead of Legislation
The exemption runs for five years. It arrived two days after a comprehensive crypto market structure bill failed to advance in the Senate, leaving the agency to set the terms for on-chain equity trading through its own orders.
OKXICE is not registered with the SEC in any capacity for this activity, the notice says. It is also outside Regulation NMS and the fair-access rules that bind exchanges. Fees will be published separately, and it gave no launch date.
Crypto companies sit inside the list as well. Coinbase, Circle, Robinhood, Securitize and BitGo are among the 63 stocks set to trade as tokens on the venue.
