More Big Companies Reject Having Their Stocks Traded as Crypto Tokens

Wells Fargo, Cisco, and Intuit join a growing list of 22 firms objecting to a new platform trading their shares as blockchain tokens.

A new trading platform wants to let people buy and sell shares of famous companies as digital tokens — but many of those companies are saying "no thanks."

What's happening? A company called OKXICE TSV is building a venue to trade tokenized stocks (regular company shares turned into digital tokens that live on a blockchain, so they can be traded 24/7, unlike normal stocks that only trade during market hours). The platform is a partnership between OKX (a crypto exchange) and ICE (the company that owns the New York Stock Exchange).

The problem: A growing number of big companies don't want their shares traded there. Six more just joined the list:

Wells Fargo (a major U.S. bank)
Cisco Systems (networking tech)
Marvell Technology (chipmaker)
Arm Holdings (chip designer)
Moderna (vaccine maker)
Intuit (maker of TurboTax)

That brings the total to 22 objecting companies, up from just 9 on October 15. Earlier objectors include Microsoft, Alphabet (Google's parent), and Goldman Sachs. None of the companies have explained why they object — or even said what effect their objection has.

Why might they be worried? The platform's own notice lists several risks:

No circuit breakers (automatic trading pauses that stop panic selling) beyond basic halts.
No protection against "transaction reordering" — traders could rearrange the order of trades on the blockchain to profit unfairly.
Smart contracts (the self-running code that handles trades) can be upgraded without warning users.
The code controlling who can trade was only checked internally, not by an outside expert.

The bigger picture: The platform plans to operate under a special SEC exemption (a permission from the U.S. market regulator). Interestingly, the IMF (International Monetary Fund) recently found real demand for tokenized stocks — especially outside normal market hours — but warned the market is still volatile and hard to trade in and out of.

Bottom line: Tokenized stocks are an exciting idea, but many of America's biggest companies clearly have concerns, and the list of objectors keeps growing.

This is an AI-generated summary. Read the original article at: https://decrypt.co/381784/wells-fargo-cisco-intuit-more-companies-object-tokenized-stocks