ICE and OKX Form Joint Venture to Tokenize Equities With Andrew Cuomo at the Helm

Intercontinental Exchange, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, and crypto exchange OKX announced Monday they are forming a joint venture to build tokenized securities and digital asset infrastructure. The deal, pending regulatory approval, would give OKX’s 120 million retail customers access to ICE’s benchmarks and financial markets technology.

Andrew Cuomo, the former New York Governor and Attorney General who has advised OKX since 2023, will co-chair the venture alongside ICE. An OKX spokesperson told Fortune the joint venture’s initial focus will be tokenizing NYSE-listed equities.

This story is an excerpt from the Unchained Daily newsletter.

The deal follows ICE’s March announcement of a strategic investment in OKX at a $25 billion valuation. In May, the two firms launched crypto-native perpetual oil futures for non-U.S. customers, amid the rise in popularity of commodity markets on decentralized exchange platform Hyperliquid.

For ICE, the joint venture is a deepening bet on the convergence of regulated market infrastructure and crypto-native distribution. The deal also gives OKX its most credentialed path yet to onboard institutional and retail capital from traditional finance.

The ICE-OKX venture is the latest move in a crowded race to bring traditional securities on-chain. The SEC delayed its “innovation exemption” for tokenized stocks in May following pushback from stock exchanges concerned about third-party synthetic tokens, but both NYSE and Nasdaq had already won separate SEC approval for tokenized equity trading earlier in the year. Coinbase, Robinhood, and Kraken have each launched or announced competing tokenized stock products in recent months.

Related Listen: https://unchainedcrypto.com/bits-bips/why-the-sec-paused-on-its-innovation-exemption-for-tokenization-bits-bips/