ARK Invest, led by Cathie Wood, is migrating its venture fund to blockchain infrastructure, introducing a portfolio that features investments in OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe, and Databricks onto onchain rails.
The ARK Venture Fund (ARKVX) will distribute tokenized shares utilizing technology from Securitize (SECZ), with the digital asset firm managing the onchain issuance and overall user journey.
According to the organizations, ARKVX will launch initially on Ethereum, with the possibility of expanding to alternative blockchain networks later.
“Making the ARK Venture Fund available onchain is a natural extension of our mission to democratize access to technologically enabled disruptive innovation,” stated Wood, who serves as ARK’s founder, CEO, and chief investment officer.
Carlos Domingo, CEO of Securitize, noted that a primary benefit is granting investors diversified exposure to high-demand private technology entities.
“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 part of a growing contingent of Wall Street institutions drawn to asset tokenization as managers seek to bring conventional financial assets onto blockchain rails. While early initiatives, such as funds from BlackRock (BUIDL) and Franklin Templeton (BENJI), focused primarily on U.S. Treasuries and money-market instruments, institutions are now expanding further into equities and private markets. In a baseline scenario, analysts at Citi projected that tokenized securities could climb to $5.5 trillion by 2030.
Last week, the sector also received regulatory momentum when the Securities and Exchange Commission introduced a five-year “innovation exemption” permitting select tokenized U.S. equities to trade on specialized onchain marketplaces. This regulatory structure offers financial entities an additional avenue to test blockchain-based securities as authorities work to integrate a larger share of the market onchain.
ARKVX functions as an actively managed interval fund that allocates capital across both private and publicly listed enterprises. Tokenizing the fund does not place those individual underlying businesses onchain nor render their shares freely transferable. Instead, participants obtain a cryptographic representation reflecting their stake in the fund.
“The underlying assets will still remain private, but the investment of the end users will be liquid,” Domingo explained.
Additionally, Securitize intends to supply a daily net asset value and facilitate the trading of fund shares across blockchain-enabled venues.
This arrangement expands upon the existing partnership between the two companies. Last year, ARK completed a strategic investment in Securitize and committed to introducing additional regulated investment vehicles onchain.
Originally published at https://www.coindesk.com/business/2026/09/24/cathie-wood-s-ark-teams-with-securitize-to-tokenize-venture-fund-with-openai-anthropic-stakes.
