ARK Invest to Tokenize Its Venture Fund on Ethereum Through Securitize

NEW YORK — ARK Invest, the asset manager led by Cathie Wood, is tokenizing its ARK Venture Fund through a partnership with Securitize, a publicly traded tokenization platform. Under the arrangement, Securitize provides the on-chain issuance and investor infrastructure, and eligible investors can access tokenized interests in the fund — designated ARKVX — through Securitize's platform, with the token representations issued on Ethereum.

It is worth being precise about what is and is not being tokenized. Investors receive a blockchain-based representation of their interest in the ARK Venture Fund itself, not direct tokenized shares of the individual private companies the fund holds. The fund remains the legal vehicle holding those underlying positions; the token is a wrapper around an investor's claim on the fund, distributed and recorded via Securitize's infrastructure rather than traditional transfer-agent recordkeeping alone.

The ARK Venture Fund itself is a closed-end fund structure that gives retail-accessible exposure to a mix of private, pre-IPO companies alongside some public holdings — a structure ARK has marketed as a way for non-accredited investors to get exposure to late-stage private companies that are otherwise typically restricted to institutional or accredited buyers. Tokenizing the fund interest through Securitize does not change what the fund holds; it changes how ownership of a stake in that fund is issued and recorded.

The move places ARK Invest alongside a widening list of asset managers experimenting with tokenized fund structures in 2026, using Securitize and comparable platforms as the on-chain issuance layer rather than building proprietary blockchain infrastructure themselves. The appeal for asset managers is largely operational: token-based issuance and transfer records can, in principle, simplify recordkeeping and secondary transfers for otherwise illiquid or semi-liquid fund interests, though the actual liquidity of a tokenized private-fund interest depends on whether a functioning secondary market for that token exists, not on the tokenization itself.

As with other tokenized-fund efforts, the practical test will be adoption: whether investors and, eventually, secondary venues treat the tokenized ARKVX interest as materially easier to hold, transfer or trade than the fund's traditional share structure, or whether the blockchain layer ends up as a recordkeeping detail with little effect on how investors actually experience the fund.