Walmart and Eli Lilly Tell OKX and ICE Their Shares Are Not for Tokenizing

Walmart, Eli Lilly, Cigna, Carnival and Arcos Dorados have objected to their shares being traded on the tokenized stock venue planned by OKX and Intercontinental Exchange, Decrypt reported. That brings the total number of companies that have refused to 38.

A tokenized stock is a blockchain token whose value is meant to track a listed share, usually backed by the real share held somewhere in custody. The venue under construction by OKX, the crypto exchange, and ICE, the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, would list such tokens for trading outside normal market hours.

Why an issuer gets a say at all

In the European structures that dominate the market today, issuers have no say: a broker buys the share, issues a token against it, and the company whose name is on the certificate is never consulted. A venue built by ICE is a different proposition, because ICE has a listed-company relationship to protect and a regulator watching. Giving issuers an opt-out is the price of building it inside the existing market structure rather than beside it.

The refusals have been accumulating steadily. The count stood at nine earlier in the autumn and is now 38, which means the objection is no longer a handful of outliers. Walmart and Eli Lilly between them sit among the largest companies on the US market by revenue and market value respectively, and their absence is the kind of gap a trading venue notices.

What a blocked name means in practice

A venue cannot offer a liquid market in a share that the issuer has refused. The economic exposure can be replicated through derivatives, but a token marketed as representing a share in Walmart, without Walmart's consent, is precisely the arrangement ICE is trying not to build.

The companies have not published detailed reasoning. The general concern among listed issuers, voiced repeatedly through the year, is that a parallel market trading at a different price from the primary listing creates a reference price they do not control and cannot explain to shareholders.

The pattern across the sector

This is the second strand of issuer resistance this year. AMC's chief executive said the cinema chain would not permit Robinhood to tokenize its shares, and research published in October found that only about a tenth of tokenized stock value carries the issuer's blessing.

Consent, in other words, is becoming the dividing line in this market. The offshore products that make up most of the current volume do not have it. The regulated venues being built now are asking for it, and are discovering how many companies say no.