Cathie Wood's ARK teams with Securitize to tokenize venture fund with OpenAI, Anthropic stakes

Cathie Wood's ARK Invest is putting its venture fund on blockchain rails, bringing a portfolio that includes stakes in OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe and Databricks onto blockchain rails.

The ARK Venture Fund (ARKVX) will issue tokenized interests using infrastructure from Securitize (SECZ), with the tokenization firm handling onchain issuance and the investor experience.

ARKVX will be first available on Ethereum

“Making the ARK Venture Fund available onchain is a natural extension of our mission to democratize access to technologically enabled disruptive innovation,” Wood, ARK's founder, CEO and chief investment officer, said in a statement.

For Securitize CEO Carlos Domingo, one draw is giving investors diversified exposure to sought-after 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.

ARK is joining a roster of Wall Street firms being drawn to tokenization as asset managers look to put traditional financial products on blockchain rails. Much of the early attempts, like BlackRock’s BUIDL and Franklin Templeton’s BENJI funds, centered on U.S. Treasuries and money-market products, but firms are now pushing further into equities and private markets. Citi analysts projected that tokenized securities could reach $5.5 trillion by 2030 as its base case.

The sector also got 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. The framework gives financial firms another pathway to experiment with blockchain-based securities as regulators seek to bring more of the market onchain.

ARKVX is an actively managed interval fund investing across private and publicly traded companies. Tokenizing it doesn't put those individual companies onchain or make their shares freely tradable. Investors instead receive a blockchain-based representation of their interest in the fund.

“The underlying assets will still remain private, but the investment of the end users will be liquid,” Domingo said.

Securitize also plans to provide a daily net asset value and enable the fund interests to trade on blockchain-based markets.