ICE is designing tokenized shares that keep their dividends and their votes

Run the fivefold increase backwards and the entire tokenized equity category was worth about $310 million in mid-2025, so it added roughly $1.26 billion of distributed value in twelve months ^[1]. Both parties are building for a market that size.

They sit at different stages, and they are selling to different buyers. Blockchain.com has a live catalog that went from about 100 listings to more than 430, some 4.3 times in eight months, open to non-US users only ^[2][4]. Intercontinental Exchange has a January announcement, a March memorandum of understanding, a named transfer agent, and eight months in the approval process without a launch date ^[5][6][8][3]. Blockchain.com's product shipped about three months before ICE described its platform ^[4].

The fungibility goal is the more consequential term. ICE's design would keep a tokenized share the same instrument as the conventional one, with dividend eligibility and shareholder voting intact ^[10]. Cryptobriefing argues that a token which loses dividend eligibility or complicates a proxy vote would meet serious adoption resistance from institutional investors ^[15]. Under US law tokenized securities already sit inside securities rules, which means broker-dealer involvement, SEC oversight and transfer agent registration ^[13]. Naming Securitize, a registered firm with BlackRock among its backers, is how ICE proposes to get from minting tokens to meeting those requirements ^[6][7].

In my view these stay separate for a while, because each is answering a different question. Blockchain.com's question is distribution, and the answer today is 430 assets in a wallet ^[3]. ICE's question is legal identity, and the answer it wants is that a token and a share are the same claim on the same company ^[10]. The counter-thesis is that $1.57 billion of total distributed value is too small for either answer to have been tested by demand ^[11], and that the fungibility work only counts if the SEC agrees to it. Cryptobriefing argues that a wallet holding 430 tokenized assets is genuinely useful to a non-US retail investor and not yet something asset managers or pension funds would use at scale ^[16].

Each path forecloses something. Blockchain.com is spending on catalog breadth and accepting a market drawn by geography, where every additional country is its own regulatory exercise ^[14]. ICE is spending time instead of shipping, and what it declines to build is a separate pool of tokenized shares trading away from the existing book ^[15].

An approved launch date with fungibility intact would break this reading, because it would turn the non-US wallet into a feeder for NYSE's order book. The two firms have not signed a joint venture or a data-sharing agreement ^[12]. A refusal would leave the only working tokenized US equity product in a wallet that US residents cannot open ^[4].