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Key Takeaways
- ARK’s Venture Fund will issue tokenized interests via Securitize, giving investors a liquid, blockchain-based claim on the fund rather than direct tokenized shares in portfolio companies.
- The fund launches first on Ethereum, following earlier tokenization efforts like BlackRock’s BUIDL and Franklin Templeton’s BENJI that focused on Treasuries and money markets.
- The move follows the SEC’s new five-year tokenized-stock trading exemption and builds on ARK’s existing strategic investment in Securitize.
Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest is bringing its venture fund onto blockchain infrastructure, giving eligible investors a tokenized path to exposure on holdings that include stakes in OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe and Databricks.
The ARK Venture Fund will issue tokenized interests using infrastructure built by tokenization firm Securitize, which will handle on-chain issuance and manage the investor experience.
An Actively Managed Fund, Not Tokenized Shares in the Underlying Companies
The ARK Venture Fund is an actively managed interval fund that invests across a mix of private and publicly traded companies. Tokenizing the fund does not put the individual portfolio companies themselves on-chain or make their underlying shares freely tradable.
Instead, investors receive a blockchain-based representation of their ownership interest in the fund as a whole.
Securitize Chief Executive Carlos Domingo said the structure lets investors gain diversified exposure to competing private technology companies without needing to pick a single winner among them.
“Here you get both of them in a diversified pool.”
Domingo added that while the fund’s underlying assets remain private and illiquid, tokenizing investors’ interests in the fund itself is intended to make those interests more liquid. This gives fund holders a way to trade their position even though the companies the fund invests in remain outside public markets.
Securitize also plans to provide a daily net asset value for the fund and enable the tokenized interests to trade on blockchain-based markets.
Wood Frames the Move as an Access Play
ARK founder, CEO and chief investment officer Cathie Wood said the move to bring the fund on-chain extends the firm’s broader mission of expanding access to disruptive technology investments that have traditionally been available only to institutional or accredited investors.
The fund will first be available on Ethereum, with the companies saying other blockchain networks could follow.
Part of a Broader Wall Street Push Into Tokenization
ARK’s move adds to a growing list of traditional asset managers bringing investment products onto blockchain rails. Early efforts in this space, including BlackRock’s BUIDL fund and Franklin Templeton’s BENJI fund, focused mainly on U.S. Treasuries and money-market products.
ARK’s venture fund tokenization instead extends the trend into private equity and venture-stage technology investments, a less liquid and historically harder-to-access asset class.
Citi has projected the tokenized securities market could reach $5.5 trillion by 2030 in its base-case scenario, a forecast that has helped drive a wave of institutional interest in blockchain-based fund structures over the past year.
Regulatory Backdrop Supports the Timing
The move follows a regulatory development from the prior week, when the SEC introduced a five-year innovation exemption allowing certain tokenized U.S. stocks to trade on specially designed on-chain venues.
That framework gives financial firms an additional regulatory pathway to experiment with blockchain-based securities products as regulators work to bring more of the traditional market on-chain.
While that specific exemption applies to individual tokenized stocks rather than fund interests like ARKVX, its introduction reflects a broader regulatory environment that has grown more accommodating toward blockchain-based securities infrastructure generally, a shift ARK and Securitize are positioned to benefit from.
Regulators’ growing willingness to engage directly with tokenization proposals, rather than treating blockchain-based securities structures as inherently incompatible with existing rules, has been cited by several asset managers this year as a factor accelerating their own tokenization timelines.
ARK’s decision to move forward with ARKVX’s tokenization now, rather than waiting for additional rulemaking, suggests the firm views the current regulatory posture as sufficiently settled to proceed.
Building on an Existing Partnership
Wednesday’s announcement extends a relationship between the two firms that began last year, when ARK made a strategic investment in Securitize and agreed to bring additional regulated investment products on-chain over time.
That earlier investment positioned ARK as both an investor in Securitize’s tokenization infrastructure and now a customer using that infrastructure for its own fund, a dual relationship that aligns the two companies’ incentives around the fund’s success.
