Ark Invest Puts $1.3B Venture Fund on Ethereum

Cathie Wood's Ark Invest is tokenizing a $1.3 billion venture fund on Ethereum, giving eligible investors an onchain claim on stakes in OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe and Databricks. On Thursday, Ark Invest and Securitize announced that eligible investors will be able to access a tokenized version of the $ARK Venture Fund, known as ARKVX, through Securitize's platform.

The fund had grown to roughly $1.3 billion in assets by late June. The tokenized version launches on Ethereum, with Securitize handling ARKVX's onchain issuance and investor infrastructure.

The structure deserves scrutiny. Investors are not getting blockchain-native OpenAI or Anthropic shares. They receive an onchain representation of interests in the fund that owns those companies. The blockchain layer changes how eligible investors hold and interact with their fund interest, not what sits inside the portfolio.

That distinction matters because ARKVX is not an ETF. Originally launched on Sept. 23, 2022, it is an actively managed closed-end interval fund built to hold both private and public companies. Its target mix is roughly 80% private and 20% public. Investors cannot simply dump shares at will. The fund offers quarterly repurchase windows for about 5% of outstanding shares, and requests are subject to proration if too many investors head for the exit at once.

Wood framed the move as a deliberate bet on the future of capital markets. "Tokenizing the $ARK Venture Fund puts our conviction in the evolution, if not revolution, of capital markets into practice," said Cathie Wood, founder, CEO and CIO of Ark Invest. "Based on our research, tokenization has the potential to reshape fundamentally the way that investors access and participate in both private and public financial markets."

She added: "Making the $ARK Venture Fund available onchain is a natural extension of our mission to democratize access to technologically enabled disruptive innovation. Because it has built the regulated infrastructure to help make that vision a reality, we are excited to partner with Securitize in taking this important step forward."

The partnership did not appear overnight. Ark Invest had already invested strategically in Securitize in October 2025. Thursday's move turns that relationship into an operating product.

ARKVX arrives at the blockchain with a strong, if volatile, track record. Its NAV began near $20 and stood around $60.50 on Sept. 23, 2026, roughly tripling since inception before accounting for share-class and distribution differences. Approximate NAV returns were 61% in 2023, 7% in 2024, 56% in 2025, and around 32% so far this year through late September.

The fund carries costs and constraints. It charges a roughly 2.90% net expense ratio and offers limited liquidity, while valuations of private holdings can move sharply when portfolio companies raise new money. That same private-company exposure paid off in the second quarter of 2026, when ARKVX posted a 20.21% return. Ark Invest identified SpaceX and Anthropic as the biggest contributors.

The move signals how tokenization is shifting from crypto-native experiments toward established asset managers with mainstream private-market portfolios. A fund built partly around companies pushing technology into unfamiliar territory is getting its own technological wrapper. The assets inside remain the same. The rails around them are changing.