ICE and OKX Joint Venture Files to Trade Tokenised US Stocks via Uniswap Pools

OKXICE, the equal joint venture between Intercontinental Exchange and cryptocurrency exchange OKX, has submitted a notice to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) declaring its intention to operate a tokenised securities venue (TSV) under an exemption the Commission issued on 17 September. That exemption permits venues trading tokenised US stocks through permissioned automated market makers to avoid classification as exchanges, subject to conditions, for a period of five years.

The filing covers more than 60 National Market System (NMS) stocks, including Apple, Nvidia, Tesla, JPMorgan, and Goldman Sachs. Each stock will trade against a payment stablecoin, either USDC, USDG, or USDT, inside permissioned Uniswap v4 liquidity pools deployed on XLayer, OKX’s layer-2 blockchain. A mandatory 30-day waiting period under the TSV exemption means trading cannot begin before early November at the earliest. One complication has already emerged: AI company Cerebras has filed an issuer objection, blocking its stock from inclusion in the pools.

Despite the decentralised exchange infrastructure, OKXICE retains centralised administrative control. The joint venture creates every pool, approves every wallet through soulbound tokens, and holds the ability to pause trading and upgrade contracts, with those administrative keys managed by its affiliate OKX Technology. That architecture matters to operators assessing how “decentralised” this venue actually is in practice, and what counterparty and operational dependencies remain concentrated at the joint-venture level.