ARK Invest, the disruptive-innovation investment manager founded by Cathie Wood, announced on 24 September that it has tokenized the ARK Venture Fund (ARKVX) through Securitize Corp. (NYSE: SECZ), bringing the actively managed fund onchain for the first time.
Tokenized interests in the fund are available initially on Ethereum, with Securitize handling the onchain issuance and the investor experience. The move puts one of ARK’s flagship strategies onchain and reflects a shared conviction between the two firms that tokenization can modernize how investment products are accessed, owned, and managed.
What the fund holds
ARKVX is an actively managed, closed-end interval fund that invests across private and public companies aligned with disruptive innovation. Its portfolio includes stakes in OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe, and Databricks, among others, so eligible investors who access the fund through Securitize gain exposure to leading private technology companies through blockchain-based infrastructure. Fund holdings are subject to change.
ARK, which Wood founded in 2014 and is headquartered in St. Petersburg, Florida, focuses solely on disruptive innovation, targeting large-scale opportunities across artificial intelligence, robotics, energy storage, and blockchain technology. As an interval fund, ARKVX offers limited liquidity through periodic repurchase offers, and its shares are not listed on an exchange; the tokenized interests represent a stake in the fund itself rather than direct ownership of the underlying companies.
Why ARK is going onchain
“Tokenizing the ARK Venture Fund puts our conviction in the evolution, if not revolution, of capital markets into practice,” said Cathie Wood, ARK’s founder, CEO and chief investment officer. “Making the ARK Venture Fund available onchain is a natural extension of our mission to democratize access to technologically enabled disruptive innovation.”
Securitize co-founder and CEO Carlos Domingo framed the launch as proof that established managers can move existing products onto modern rails. “Bringing ARKVX onchain demonstrates how leading asset managers can use tokenization to move established investment products onto modern capital markets infrastructure,” he said.
A widening institutional push
The tokenization follows the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s innovation exemption for tokenized stock trading and extends Securitize’s regulatory footprint, including a memorandum of understanding with Dubai’s VARA signed in September. Securitize, which reports roughly $5 billion in assets under management as of August, says it is the only company operating regulated digital-securities infrastructure in both the U.S. and the EU, and counts Apollo, BlackRock, BNY, Hamilton Lane, KKR, and VanEck among its partners.
