JPMorgan, Coca-Cola and Dell push tokenized-stock objections to 33 as a mystery Wall Street Journal ad tells CEOs to opt out

The list of companies refusing to have their shares traded on OKXICE keeps growing. An updated public notice from the venue on Tuesday added seven objectors, six of them named by CoinDesk: JPMorgan Chase, Coca-Cola, Dell Technologies, Adobe, Applied Materials and Sandisk. That takes disclosed objections to 33, from 26 in the previous notice, and by CoinDesk's count 30 of the original 62-company roster, about 48%, have opted out. Wells Fargo, Arm and Cerebras also objected but were not listed in that filing.

OKXICE, a joint venture of OKX and NYSE parent Intercontinental Exchange, plans round-the-clock trading through Uniswap v4 pools on OKX's XLayer chain under the SEC's five-year innovation exemption, which gives companies 30 days after notification to object. A JPMorgan spokesperson said the bank is encouraged by tokenization's potential but is cautious about how its shares are represented and traded and will not participate at this stage. Andrew Cuomo, the venue's co-chair, called the SEC programme a sandbox and said many companies were expected to wait and see.

A second front opened in print. A full-page ad in the Journal's weekend edition, headlined, in capitals, "Your stock. Their tokens. Your problem", warned CEOs of price distortions, hidden ownership, market manipulation and cybertheft and told them they had 30 days to opt out. CoinDesk traced payment to Common Sense Leadership Fund, a conservative-leaning Arlington, Virginia nonprofit that did not respond to questions. Nasdaq said it had no connection to the ad, even though the ad's QR code pointed to a Nasdaq FAQ. By Wednesday Securitize had run its own full-page Journal ad, and its chief executive Carlos Domingo wrote on X: "We fight propaganda with facts."