ARK Invest tokenises its $1.3bn ARK Venture Fund on Ethereum through Securitize

ARK Investment Management said on 24 September 2026 that it had tokenised the ARK Venture Fund, a $1.3bn portfolio that holds stakes in private companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe and Databricks, and issued it on the Ethereum blockchain through the tokenisation platform Securitize. The announcement came in a press release datelined Miami at 09:00 Eastern time. It is the first ARK fund to be issued this way.

ARK Investment Management has issued its venture fund on Ethereum through Securitize.

The mechanics are narrower than the framing suggests. The ARK Venture Fund, which trades under the ticker ARKVX, is a non-diversified closed-end interval fund. An interval fund is a pooled investment vehicle that does not let holders sell whenever they choose. Instead it offers to buy back a limited quantity of shares at set intervals, and the release states plainly that those repurchase offers may be oversubscribed, meaning an investor who wants out may be able to sell only part of a holding, or none. Tokenising the fund does not alter that. The repurchase schedule is a term of the fund, not a property of the record-keeping system beneath it.

What does change is the register. Securitize provides what the release calls regulated infrastructure for onchain issuance and the investor experience, which in practice means the platform records who owns the fund's shares and handles the onboarding of the investors permitted to buy them. Access is limited to what the release describes only as eligible investors reaching the fund through Securitize. No minimum subscription is disclosed, and the release names no regulator that has reviewed the arrangement.

That restriction has a consequence for the claim usually made about tokenised funds. A token can only be transferred to someone the issuer's platform will accept, so if the buyer pool is limited to investors Securitize has onboarded, the resale market is limited to the same pool. Tokenisation widens the register to the extent that the platform's investor base is wider than ARK's existing one, and no further. On the evidence in the release, that is the whole of the gain, and it is a distribution gain rather than a liquidity one.

Why an asset manager does this

The commercial logic is distribution. Securitize reported roughly 5 billion dollars of assets under administration as of August 2026 and lists Apollo, BlackRock, BNY, Hamilton Lane, KKR and VanEck among the managers it works with. A manager that issues through it reaches a pool of investors already set up to hold tokenised securities, without building that plumbing in-house. ARK is not a disinterested customer: it made a strategic investment in Securitize announced in October 2025, and Securitize now trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker SECZ.

Cathie Wood, ARK's founder, chief executive and chief investment officer, said that "Tokenizing the ARK Venture Fund puts our conviction in the evolution of capital markets into practice". Carlos Domingo, co-founder and chief executive of Securitize, said that "ARK has built its business around identifying transformative technologies early and then acting with conviction".

The wider pattern is a year old. Franklin Templeton brought a tokenised money market fund to new networks in August 2026, and Aberdeen Investments turned to tokenisation for part of its fund range in September. Those are cash-like products, where the underlying assets can be valued every day and sold quickly. A venture portfolio is the opposite case: the holdings are private, marked infrequently and cannot be liquidated on demand. That is precisely why the interval structure exists, and it is the reason a token on this fund cannot deliver the continuous liquidity that tokenisation is often described as providing.

What it means from London

Nothing in the announcement reaches a UK investor. The release does not mention the United Kingdom, Europe or the Financial Conduct Authority, and neither the FCA nor HM Treasury has set out how units in a tokenised fund domiciled elsewhere may be marketed or held in the UK. A UK fund manager considering the same step would be doing so into an unsettled position.

The more useful read for a British audience is on structure rather than technology. UK venture funds have spent the past year turning to evergreen vehicles and manager-led secondary sales to give their own investors a route to cash, which addresses the same complaint from the opposite direction: it changes the terms of the fund rather than the ledger it sits on. ARK has done the second without doing the first. Whether investors treat that as progress will depend on how the next repurchase window is filled.

Key takeaways

• ARK Investment Management tokenised the 1.3 billion dollar ARK Venture Fund on Ethereum through Securitize, announced on 24 September 2026, its first fund to be issued this way.

• The fund remains a closed-end interval fund, so investors can exit only at set repurchase windows, and the release states those offers may be oversubscribed.

• Access is restricted to eligible investors onboarded by Securitize, with no minimum subscription and no supervising regulator disclosed.

• ARK invested in Securitize in October 2025, and Securitize now trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker SECZ.

• The release makes no reference to the United Kingdom, and UK regulators have not set out how tokenised fund units may be marketed or held here.

This is general information, not legal, tax or investment advice.

Sources: Securitize (PR Newswire), ARK Invest Tokenizes ARK Venture Fund (ARKVX) with Securitize, The Block, ARK Invest brings $1.3 billion venture fund onchain through Securitize