Asset manager ARK Invest is tokenizing its ARK Venture Fund (ARKVX) through infrastructure provider Securitize, adding its portfolio of private and public technology company stakes to blockchain rails.
The fund gives eligible investors exposure to companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe and Databricks. Tokenized interests will initially launch on Ethereum before expanding to other networks, the firms said.
ARK made a strategic investment in Securitize last year and agreed to bring additional regulated products onchain under that arrangement.
"Making the ARK Venture Fund available onchain is a natural extension of our mission to democratize access to technologically enabled disruptive innovation," Cathie Wood, ARK's founder, CEO and chief investment officer, said in a statement.
For Securitize CEO Carlos Domingo, the fund offers a way to gain diversified exposure to high-demand private technology companies. "If you don't know whether OpenAI or Anthropic are gonna win the AI race, here you get both of them in a diversified pool," Domingo told CoinDesk TV.
ARKVX is an actively managed interval fund that invests across both private and publicly traded companies. Tokenization does not place the underlying companies' shares onchain or make them freely tradable; investors instead receive a blockchain-based representation of their fund interest.
"The underlying assets will still remain private, but the investment of the end users will be liquid," Domingo said. Securitize plans to provide a daily net asset value and enable trading of fund interests on blockchain-based markets.
The move follows a wave of Wall Street asset managers bringing investment products onto blockchains. Early efforts, including BlackRock's BUIDL and Franklin Templeton's BENJI funds, focused on U.S. Treasuries and money-market products. Firms are now extending tokenization into equities and private markets.
Citi analysts have projected that tokenized securities could reach $5.5 trillion by 2030 under their base case.
The sector received a regulatory boost last week when the Securities and Exchange Commission unveiled a five-year "innovation exemption" allowing certain tokenized U.S. stocks to trade on specially designed onchain venues, giving firms another pathway to experiment with blockchain-based securities.
