The New York Stock Exchange has a trading floor, an opening bell and 234 years of history. Its parent company now also wants to run Uniswap pools.
On Sunday, OKXICE, ICE's 50-50 joint venture with crypto exchange OKX, published plans to trade tokenized Apple, Nvidia and 61 other U.S. stocks around the clock, settled in stablecoins.
ICE is dead serious about making tokenization work. OKXICE is already its third route to bringing U.S. equities onchain, and you can rank the three by how much of today's market they keep:
Tokenized delivery: Trading runs as usual on NYSE's order book and settles T+1 through DTC, which delivers a token instead of a regular share on request. NYSE's rules are in place, but the service depends on DTCC's tokenization service, which is due to launch this month.
A digital NYSE: A separate venue for 24/7 trading and instant onchain settlement, for both tokenized versions of existing shares and natively issued ones. It is still being built.
OKXICE: Trading itself moves onchain, into permissioned Uniswap v4 pools.
That last route keeps almost nothing: no order book, no clearing agency, no central counterparty, no netting. An equity token and a stablecoin swap atomically inside the pool, with every token backed by a real share, held one-for-one by a third-party tokenizer through a registered broker-dealer.
All of this rests on the SEC's new innovation exemption, which we covered when it came out last month. It lets venues like OKXICE operate without registering as an exchange, as long as they stay small: for the largest stocks, at most 75 symbols and 0.25% of each stock's prior-month average daily volume.
With caps that tight, ICE has effectively bought a five-year option, expiring in 2031. It pays off if tokenized stocks in AMMs grow faster than expected, or if 24/7 trading hits the same wall as CME last week, where traders didn't want weekend shifts.
Liquidity pools don't mind.
IN TODAY’S BRIEFING:
Stablecoin payments come to the SAP ecosystem
South Korea drafts rules to bring its capital markets onchain
HIGH SIGNAL NEWS
SAP-backed payments firm Tereina integrates Circle’s stablecoins. The partnership brings USDC and EURC into Tereina’s payments infrastructure, starting with SAP Cloud ERP, allowing eligible businesses to access stablecoin payments through SAP Pay without introducing separate systems. SAP has more than 400,000 customers globally, with 84% of global commerce touching an SAP application. 🌍
South Africa’s second-largest banking group launches its crypto offering. First National Bank, part of FirstRand, now offers 24/7 trading in crypto assets including BTC, ETH and SOL directly through its banking app for its nearly 9 million retail customers. The launch follows Absa’s rollout of digital asset custody two weeks ago, which we covered here. 🇿🇦
S&P Global Ratings launches risk assessment for digital asset vaults. Going forward, the firm will assess lending vaults across six risk factors, including portfolio credit quality, liquidity mismatches, curator risk, protocol risk, blockchain risk, and vault security and governance. Vaults are among the fastest-growing segments in digital assets, with total deposits reaching $10 billion in September 2026. 🔎
TOP STORY
South Korea Drafts Rules to Bring Its Capital Markets Onchain
New rules: Last week, South Korea’s Financial Services Commission (FSC) published the draft rules for its tokenized securities regime, which takes effect on February 4, 2027. The rules implement laws passed in January that recognize distributed ledgers as securities registers and are the final set of implementing rules before the regime is due to go live. A public consultation runs until November 11.
Why it matters: Roughly a quarter of global crypto trading against fiat currencies takes place in won, making South Korea one of the world’s largest retail crypto markets. Institutional participation, by contrast, has been almost non-existent: companies were barred from trading crypto in principle from 2017, and while authorities have begun to reopen the market to some corporates, banks and other financial institutions remain excluded. Regulators are instead steering them into digital assets through tokenized securities built on the country’s regulated capital-markets infrastructure, a route the FSC first outlined in 2023 and the new rules now spell out.
Built around the depository: At the center of the new rules sits the Korea Securities Depository (KSD), the country’s central securities depository (CSD). Every ledger used to register tokenized securities must be shared with the KSD and at least two account managers, such as securities firms or banks. That makes Korea’s model more centralized than approaches in Germany and Switzerland, where certain securities can be issued directly into DLT-based registers without requiring a conventional CSD to operate the register.
Starting small: While the KSD’s place at the center is fixed from the start, the range of securities the regime covers will widen in stages. The first phase covers institutional money market funds and bonds, certain unlisted shares and fractional investment products, with the cash leg kept offchain. Onchain payments linked to stablecoins follow only in a third phase, which depends partly on pending stablecoin legislation.
“While tokenized securities fit within existing securities law, won-denominated stablecoins raise unresolved monetary and foreign exchange questions, including whether banks should remain central to their issuance by holding at least 50% of the equity in issuers. Tokenized deposits, meanwhile, are still a long way from being operational,” a senior director at one of South Korea’s leading commercial banks told Blockstories.
Bank money first: The Bank of Korea (BOK) has a clear view of what that cash leg should look like. In a May issue note, it argued that tokenized assets should settle first in central bank money or bank deposits, with stablecoins in a complementary role. Korea has already tested that architecture under Project Hangang, where commercial banks issue deposit tokens on top of a wholesale central bank money layer, and nine banks are now preparing its second phase. The ECB follows similar logic and launched Pontes in September to settle DLT-based trades in central bank money.
Banks prepare for both: Korea's banks are nonetheless positioning for stablecoins. Hana Financial leads a won stablecoin consortium with four other lenders. In May, Hana Bank also agreed to buy a 6.55% stake in Dunamu, the operator of Korea's largest crypto exchange, Upbit, for about KRW 1 trillion ($670 million), and the two companies agreed to build a won stablecoin ecosystem together.
Qivalis bridge: Other banks look toward Europe: UniKA, an alliance of about ten Korean banks, has teamed up with Qivalis, the 37-bank consortium preparing a euro stablecoin, on a framework for same-day won-euro FX settlement using stablecoins.
Two-way traffic: On the securities side, Korean banks have turned to foreign platforms while the domestic regime is still being built. KB Kookmin Bank raised $100 million on HSBC’s Orion in June, and Hana Bank raised the same amount on Euroclear’s D-FMI in September.
Securitize’s Korea push: Securitize is coming from the other direction, lining up Korean partners before the tokenized securities rules take effect in February. The U.S. tokenization firm signed agreements with KB Securities, the brokerage arm of KB Kookmin’s parent group, on tokenized funds, and two weeks later with LG CNS, the LG group’s IT services arm, on infrastructure. Entities of Korean conglomerate Hanwha own 9.6% of the company.
Outlook: Those preparations still rest on draft rules. After the consultation closes on November 11, the FSC will decide whether to relax requirements such as the ledger-sharing rule, and from February the first institutional issues will test actual demand. Korea now has a start date for tokenized securities but no timetable for public securities or an onchain cash leg, and no decision yet on whether stablecoins, deposit tokens or central bank money will settle them.
Ryan Yoon is Director & Head of Research at Tiger Research, a Seoul-based digital asset research and advisory firm focused on institutional adoption in Asian markets.
Where do banks currently stand on tokenization, and what is the current level of demand for tokenized products in South Korea?
South Korea is an unusual market. Retail investors are highly active in crypto and other risk assets, while financial institutions and regulators remain cautious about changing the underlying market infrastructure. Banks see tokenization as a potential source of growth through new financial products, helping them diversify beyond the strong market revenues of recent years, which executives cannot assume will continue. For now, however, most are still testing the technology rather than committing significant capital.
That caution is reflected in a phased regulatory approach. Private-market products on selected DLT platforms come first, followed by public securities and broader stablecoin integration. Progress depends on how the initial market develops.
The longer-term attraction for banks also extends overseas. Korean institutions have spent years building subsidiaries in Singapore, the U.S., and Southeast Asia without establishing major businesses there. Tokenization is increasingly viewed as a way to differentiate their offerings and compete in global markets. Meanwhile, some of the clearest near-term demand is emerging around stablecoins, with companies such as POSCO and Hyundai testing them for cross-border payments and more efficient use of corporate cash.
On October 19–20, Frankfurt will be the place to be for anyone shaping digital assets and onchain capital markets.
On Monday evening, our institutional event series Horizon returns to Frankfurt, following a great kick-off dinner in Barcelona and a packed first Summit in Zurich. In 7-minute keynotes, category leaders such as Banking Circle, Steakhouse Financial, Digital Asset and Talos will focus on the top trends in digital assets — from vaults to tokenized equities and onchain collateral management.
The following day, European stablecoin issuer AllUnity will host the inaugural Capital & Code conference, with a full day dedicated to the use cases driving stablecoin adoption, from agentic payments and onchain treasury management to stablecoin-based cross-border payments.
Come join us in Frankfurt. We’ll be around at both events.
BBVA: Digital Assets Business Specialist - Asset Management, Madrid 🇪🇸
Capgemini: Senior Product Manager Digital Assets & Digital Cash, Paris 🇫🇷
Crédit Agricole: Senior Project Lead Digital Assets (CACEIS), Paris 🇫🇷
JPMorgan: Blockchain Security Operations Vice President, London 🇬🇧
Lloyds: Risk & Controls Manager - Digital Assets, United Kingdom 🇬🇧
Santander: Project Manager, Investments & Deposits – Crypto, Mönchengladbach 🇩🇪
Société Générale: Crypto Asset Business Development, Paris 🇫🇷
Swissquote: Crypto Compliance Officer – Monitoring, Gland 🇨🇭
Global stablecoins in 2030: a European perspective (ESM) — This paper from the European Stability Mechanism models how the growth of dollar and euro stablecoins could reshape financial flows and bank funding by 2030. The authors find that even under high adoption scenarios, the effects on the euro area financial system would likely remain manageable.
Affluent Investor Crypto Report (CoinShares) — Based on a survey of 2,230 affluent investors across seven U.S. and European markets, this report highlights a gap between crypto ownership and professional advice. At least 66% of respondents in five markets already hold digital assets, yet much of this exposure remains outside their advisers’ oversight. CoinShares argues that conservative firm policies are leaving a growing client need unmet.
→ Want more? Visit Blockstories Library for a curated selection of 120+ reports on digital assets.
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Disclaimer: The information provided in the Institutional Briefing by Blockstories does not constitute investment advice. Accordingly, we assume no liability for any investment decisions made based on the content presented herein.