22 US Stock Companies Reject Stock Tokenization: Full-Page Advertisement Warns of Eight Major Risks

According to Woofun AI, the American conservative non-profit organization Common Sense Leadership Foundation (CSLF) published a full-page paid advertisement entitled “Your Stock, Their Token, Your Problem” in the weekend edition of mainstream media, directly issuing a strict compliance warning to the CEOs of listed companies across the US, requiring them to exercise their right of exit within 30 days to block unauthorized tokenization of stocks. It is worth noting that before the advertisement was published, companies such as Microsoft (MSFT.US) and Goldman Sachs (GS.US) had successively submitted written objections to the joint project between OKX and the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE.US), totaling 22. The advertisement used this wave of objections to shouting out at listed companies that had not yet expressed their opinions. This round of opposition was viewed as a large-scale defensive counterattack by traditional financial institutions against the shadowing process of real world assets (RWA).

This visually impactful advertisement was published in the B5 weekend edition of the “Wall Street Journal” from October 24 to 25. The mirror in the picture, made up of stock vouchers, was shattered by crypto tokens, and the skeleton and nuclear radiation signs were splashed, intuitively conveying a sense of crisis. In the advertisement, CSLF systematically listed the eight hard risks that may be caused by stock tokenization, with the aim of uncovering the potential harm of digital asset institutions tokenizing publicly listed company shares without permission in “unregulated places.” The primary risk is pricing disparities (Pricing Disparities). The advertisement indicates that on-chain tokens rely on oracles and private matchmaking mechanisms, and that their 24/7 transaction prices can easily be decoupled from the original stock prices of regulated traditional exchanges, exacerbating chaos in retail transactions and inducing sharp fluctuations in both directions under extreme market conditions.

The second is obscured ownership (Obscured Ownership). The anonymous blockchain address conceals the identity of real shareholders, making it impossible for listed companies to identify lower-level shareholders, seriously hindering disclosure of legal information and communication with shareholders' meetings. As a result, capital raising (capital raising) was damaged, and large amounts of trading volume and liquidity were diverted to off-chain token replicas, substantially reducing the ability of listed companies to issue additional allotments and equity financing in the open market in the future.

At the compliance level, cybertheft (Cybertheft) may cause investors' assets to instantly drop to zero and drag listed companies into a reputational crisis; an environment lacking cross-market surveillance by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) will become a hotbed of market manipulation (Market Manipulation); the peer-to-peer transfer feature opens a huge hole for money laundering (AML/KYC Loopholes); and insufficient investor protection (Limited Investor Protection) is also classified as a risk. Finally, the advertisement harshly warns that listed companies that fail to apply for withdrawal in a timely manner are likely to face joint and several legal liabilities (Legal Liability) once the chain breaks down or thunderstorms.

The core reason for this advertisement to explode Wall Street stemmed from OKXICE, a tokenized stock project jointly planned by the crypto exchange OKX and the New York Stock Exchange parent company Intercontinental Exchange. According to data compiled by Woofun AI, the project is based on the Tokenized Securities Place (TSV) Innovation Exemption Framework introduced by the SEC in September of this year, and plans to directly include 63 US stock giants in the list of the first batch of on-chain transactions. According to the SEC's regulatory exemption design, tokenized platforms must fulfill written notification obligations to corporate issuers before official launch, and listed companies enjoy a mandatory “opt-out right (opt-out)” for 30 days; after 30 days of silence, they are considered a release, and objections are only valid for a single platform, and they still need to be re-filed for another platform. In particular, the advertisement prominently uses an alert icon on the bottom column. Listed companies can only prevent their shares from being tokenized by actively acting to file a written objection within 30 days of receiving the notice; once overdue, the SEC's current rules do not provide any remedy and exit channel after the transaction begins.

The urgency of the time window has rapidly heated up this game surrounding the right to withdraw.

Faced with this 30-day window, traditional companies have taken steps one after another. Twenty-two companies, including Microsoft, Alphabet (GOOGL.US), Goldman Sachs (WFC.US), Wells Fargo Holdings (ARM.US), and McDonald's (MCD.US), have submitted written objections and exercised their right of withdrawal after receiving the notice, and refused to circulate their shares as tokenized assets on the OKXICE platform. The public documents did not specify the specific reasons for each objection; according to records, the number of objections increased from 9 on October 15 to 16 on October 19, October It reached 22 on the 23rd. This group of companies varied greatly in size, with market capitalization ranging from about 5.5 billion US dollars to nearly 4 trillion US dollars. They were not all very large enterprises; all parties submitted their own submissions, and there was no evidence of coordinated action in the public information.

Looking at industry distribution, these companies cover various fields such as technology, finance, industry, and consumption, showing that traditional industries are generally concerned about the risk of on-chain asset mapping. By exercising their legal right of withdrawal, they seek to sever the direct link between their assets and decentralized trading platforms within a compliance framework to avoid potential legal and reputational risks.

This round of public boycotts profoundly reflects the traditional financial establishment's deep defensive mentality against cryptographic RWA assets. The boycott by listed companies and Wall Street banks is not simply distributed ledger technology itself, but rather the impact of on-chain mirroring that operates outside of the supervisory parent body on the legal foundations of established companies. Under the traditional legal framework, stocks are not only financial assets that can be traded, but are also bundled with precise voting governance rights, dividend distribution mechanisms, and legal disclosure obligations. For the crypto industry, which is committed to opening up traditional securities and on-chain liquidity, the resistance faced by the OKXICE project sounded a compliance alarm. Tokenization is not as simple as simply packaging the stock codes of listed companies into ERC-20 tokens. In the absence of collaboration between underlying issuers and a mature cross-market clearing mechanism, aggressive tokenization may instead lead to a more stringent backlash from the regulatory authorities. Traditional companies' successive withdrawals and public statements mean that the tokenization of US stocks has gone from being a geek narrative in the early days to officially entering a deep-water game where the existing order on Wall Street clashes hard.