ARK Invest tokenizes $1.3 billion venture fund through Securitize

• ARK Venture Fund (ARKVX) holds roughly $1.3 billion in assets across private and public technology companies.
• Securitize will provide the tokenization infrastructure, following ARK’s 2025 strategic investment in the firm.
• This is ARK’s first fund to move onchain through Securitize, testing whether tokenization can underpin mainstream venture products.

• $1.3B ARKVX assets under management now being tokenized
• 2025 year ARK made its strategic investment in Securitize
• 4 named portfolio companies: OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe, Databricks

ARKVX is an actively managed closed-end interval fund built around Cathie Wood’s disruptive-innovation thesis, mixing private-market bets with public equities. Securitize will handle the technical work of representing fund interests onchain while ARK keeps running the same investment strategy underneath.

ARK Keeps OpenAI and Anthropic Stakes Off-Chain, Tokenizes Only Fund Interests

The asset being tokenized is the fund interest, not the private companies inside it. OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe and Databricks remain conventional private holdings; only the wrapper investors use to access them changes.

That distinction separates ARKVX from ventures that tokenize equity in a single startup or issue a freely tradeable crypto token. Tokenization here changes how the fund is issued, held and transferred, not the legal nature of the securities ARK holds.

Ownership records, subscriptions and transfers, historically slow and fragmented in venture funds compared with listed securities, become more programmable, though tokenized wrappers do not by themselves solve liquidity constraints or investor-eligibility rules that already govern who can buy in.

ARK’s 2025 Securitize Stake Sets Up Its First Onchain Fund

The ARKVX launch builds on ARK’s 2025 strategic investment in Securitize, extending a relationship that now produces its first live tokenized product. It also lands as large asset managers keep testing blockchain rails under products that already exist in traditional finance rather than building crypto-native alternatives from scratch.

BlackRock’s BUIDL fund remains the best-known example of that pattern. Franklin Templeton and WisdomTree have each expanded tokenized-fund lineups of their own.

ARKVX pushes that same infrastructure into venture investing specifically, a corner of finance where administrative friction has historically run higher than in listed markets.

$1.3 Billion Fund Becomes a Live Test of Onchain Infrastructure

A $1.3 billion strategy moving onchain through Securitize carries more weight than a pilot with a small side vehicle, since it puts an established, actively managed fund’s operations, not just a marketing label, on blockchain rails.

Whether tokenized administration actually reduces friction for subscriptions and transfers will show up in how ARK and Securitize run the fund day to day rather than in the announcement itself.

The tokenized-collateral trend is also spreading beyond fund administration.

The CCS read. The story here is less about ARKVX’s holdings and more about Securitize converting a second high-profile asset manager relationship into a live product after its 2025 tie-up with ARK. Every additional issuer that tokenizes fund administration rather than a standalone token strengthens Securitize’s position as the default rails provider for traditional managers testing blockchain infrastructure without touching their underlying strategies.

ARK has not indicated whether it plans to extend tokenization to other funds in its lineup, and Securitize has not disclosed a timeline for ARKVX’s onchain rollout to eligible investors. The open question is whether tokenized administration measurably eases the subscription and transfer bottlenecks that have historically slowed venture-fund access, or whether investor-eligibility restrictions keep the practical experience largely unchanged for now.

Original reporting: newsbtc.com