ARK Invest Tokenizes Venture Fund on Ethereum via Securitize

Cathie Wood's ARK Invest will tokenize its ARK Venture Fund on Ethereum, the firm announced Sept. 24, giving eligible investors an onchain representation of their interests in a vehicle that backs OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe and Databricks.

Securitize will provide the issuance and investor infrastructure for the tokenized interests. The fund trades under the ticker ARKVX and invests in both private and public companies focused on disruptive innovation. Its holdings may change over time, ARK noted in the announcement.

The structure has clear limits. The arrangement does not place direct shares of those portfolio companies on a blockchain. Instead, it records investors' interests in ARKVX itself through blockchain infrastructure. Buyers of the token will not gain tokenized exposure to, say, OpenAI equity directly — they will hold a blockchain-recorded stake in the fund that owns it.

ARK Invest founder, CEO and CIO Cathie Wood said tokenizing the fund puts the firm's view of changing capital markets into practice.

The move stops short of creating a tradable crypto asset. ARKVX remains an actively managed, closed-end interval fund rather than an exchange-traded fund. Its shares are not listed on a securities exchange and are not expected to have a secondary trading market.

Liquidity stays constrained. Investors generally receive it through quarterly repurchase offers, which are expected to cover 5% of outstanding shares. When demand exceeds the amount offered, repurchases may be prorated.

That liquidity cap matters for anyone comparing the tokenized product to a crypto token or an ETF. A blockchain wrapper does not change the fund's redemption mechanics. Investors holding the tokenized interest face the same quarterly windows and the same 5% ceiling as traditional ARKVX shareholders.

Details of the onchain offering remain thin. The announcement did not specify the tokenized offering's minimum investment, subscription process, supported stablecoins or any secondary trading venue.

The deal pairs one of the most prominent names in active asset management with Securitize, a firm that has built a business issuing and administering tokenized securities. For ARK, it extends a long-running thesis about how blockchain infrastructure reshapes capital markets — from a talking point into an actual product structure.

The tokenization also puts an onchain wrapper around exposure to some of the most closely watched private companies in artificial intelligence and payments. OpenAI and Anthropic sit at the center of the current AI boom, and both remain inaccessible to most retail investors through conventional channels.

Whether tokenization broadens the fund's investor base will depend on the still-unpublished subscription terms. Until ARK and Securitize disclose the minimum investment and onboarding process, the practical reach of the Ethereum-based offering — and its effect on the fund's roughly quarterly liquidity structure — remains an open question.