Cathie Wood's Ark Invest Tokenizes Venture Fund Holding OpenAI Stakes

Ark Invest will tokenize the economic rights to its ARK Venture Fund (ARKVX), giving on-chain investors exposure to private stakes in OpenAI, Anthropic and Stripe.

CoinDesk reported on Sept. 24 that the firm, led by Cathie Wood, will carry out the tokenization with Securitize, a tokenization platform. Securitize will oversee the on-chain issuance of the fund's economic rights and set up the investor platform.

The tokenized fund interests will be issued on Ethereum (ETH). Ark Invest said it plans to tokenize the fund on other blockchains in the future.

"Offering the ARK Venture Fund on-chain is a natural extension of our goal to democratize access to disruptive innovation," Wood, Ark Invest's chief executive officer and chief investment officer, said.

An interval fund with AI exposure

The ARK Venture Fund is an actively managed interval fund that invests in both public and private companies. Unlike conventional funds, interval funds accept investor redemption requests only on a limited basis at set intervals.

Its key holdings include private technology companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Stripe. The structure gives retail-oriented fund investors a route into names that remain closed to direct public purchase.

Securitize's chief executive officer, Carlos Domingo, framed the appeal in terms of hedging the AI race. "If it is difficult to determine which of OpenAI and Anthropic will win the artificial intelligence race, investors can diversify across both companies through the ARK Venture Fund," Domingo said.

Why it matters

The deal is a concrete example of real-world asset tokenization. Fund economic rights that once lived in traditional transfer agency infrastructure will now exist as Ethereum-issued tokens, with multi-chain expansion planned.

For Ethereum, the move reinforces the network's role as settlement infrastructure for tokenized financial products. For the broader tokenization market, a fund holding stakes in OpenAI and Anthropic — two of the most closely watched private companies in artificial intelligence — gives the sector a high-profile showcase asset.

The participation of a major asset manager like Ark also signals how distribution infrastructure for traditional funds is shifting toward blockchain rails. Whether institutional adoption follows, and how quickly the multi-chain rollout proceeds, will determine whether this becomes a template for other fund managers or remains a single high-profile experiment.