Cuomo Says Tokenized Stocks Bring 'Radical Change' as OKXICE Seeks SEC Nod for 24/7 Trading
Andrew Cuomo said tokenized stocks bring 'radical change' to markets. The remarks were published by The Wall Street Journal on Oct. 9, 2026, positioning the former New York governor as the public policy face of an effort to move U.S. equity trading onto blockchain infrastructure.
The vehicle is OKXICE, a joint venture between OKX, described as a China-founded crypto company, and Intercontinental Exchange (ICE). OKXICE has filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to launch a tokenized trading platform, according to Reuters reporting on Oct. 5. The filing covers round-the-clock trading in 60 U.S. stocks, CoinDesk reported, with the venture planning to operate under the SEC's innovation exemption and offer 24/7 trading for tokenized U.S. stocks.
Cuomo signed on as co-chairman of OKXICE. He has advised OKX on U.S. strategy and regulation since 2023, a relationship that predates the joint venture structure and now places a former state executive inside a federally regulated market-structure filing.
In support of the model, Cuomo said "blockchain, liquidity pools and smart contracts are a more efficient way to trade stocks," as reported by Yahoo Finance on Oct. 4. The operational ambition is continuous trading. OKX and ICE plan 24/7 trading for tokenized U.S. stocks, removing the open and close that still define the cash equity session.
The broader context here is the choice of counterparties and permissions. A crypto-native trading venue paired with an incumbent exchange operator changes the regulatory conversation. It is not an offshore token wrapper seeking U.S. users. It is a domestic filing seeking exemptive relief for onshore trading of U.S. listed equities in token form. Scope matters. Sixty names is a controlled pilot universe, large enough to test price discovery and corporate-actions processing across sectors, small enough to contain surveillance and clearing complications.
Looking at what this means for market structure, the friction points are familiar to anyone who runs equity plumbing. Continuous trading compresses the close but disperses liquidity. Liquidity pools and smart-contract execution imply a different matching and settlement stack than a central limit order book with a clearinghouse guarantee. Questions for practitioners will center on quote continuity overnight, depth when primary-market participation thins, custody and beneficial ownership of the underlying share, handling of dividends, splits and votes, and fail and reversal procedures when finality is defined by chain state rather than depository book entry. The innovation exemption frames those questions as conditions to be negotiated, not as barriers to entry.
In my view, the efficiency claim should be priced as hypothesis until the filing produces observable microstructure. Lower ticket friction does not automatically narrow effective spreads or improve fill rates at size. Tokenization can reduce reconciliation steps and enable programmable settlement logic. It can also fragment order flow across venues with different latency, fee and market-maker obligations. For desks and issuers, the test will be whether a 24/7 token book trades at or through the primary quote, who internalizes overnight risk, and whether exemptive terms preserve investor protections around best execution, disclosure and market manipulation. Radical change, if it arrives, will show up first in those measurements rather than in the launch rhetoric.
