ARK Invest has tokenized its ARK Venture Fund on Ethereum through Securitize, putting a fund with roughly $1.3 billion in net assets and stakes in OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe and Databricks onto a public blockchain for eligible investors.
The move, announced Thursday, lets qualified investors buy tokenized shares of ARKVX with a $500 minimum, far below the entry point of most venture funds. Securitize provides the infrastructure for onchain issuance and the investor experience. Tokenized shares transfer around the clock rather than through the weekly or monthly windows of a traditional fund structure, and ownership records live on Ethereum instead of in a transfer agents spreadsheet.
The fund reported $1.3 billion in net assets as of June 30 across all share classes. Its portfolio holds some of the most closely watched private companies in technology, which is what makes the tokenization notable. Retail investors cannot normally buy OpenAI or Anthropic equity at all. A tokenized fund wrapper does not change the underlying shares, but it does open a regulated door to exposure that was previously reserved for institutional limited partners with long checkbooks and longer lockups.
Securitize was careful to spell out what is actually onchain. The company is tokenizing investors interests in ARKVX, not putting the funds stakes in OpenAI, Anthropic or other portfolio companies on the blockchain themselves. Ownership records and transfers move to Ethereum. The private company shares stay where they are, held through the usual custody chain. The distinction matters because tokenizing fund interests is a securities-engineering exercise, while tokenizing private company equity directly would raise a different set of legal questions the industry has not resolved.
A market signal
Securitize stock, which trades as SECZ, closed more than 15 percent higher on Thursday after the announcement and added another 1 percent overnight. The market read the deal as validation for the tokenization infrastructure business, which has been signing a steady stream of asset managers over the past year. The company positions itself as the transfer agent and compliance layer for tokenized securities, a role regulators have started to recognize rather than question.
ARK is not a newcomer to the company. The firm invested in Securitize in October 2025 and committed to advancing institutional adoption of tokenized securities, broadening access to regulated investment products and strengthening capital markets infrastructure. Putting its own fund on the platform it backed closes a loop that investors in both companies have been watching for a year.
The tokenization race
The deal lands in a crowded field, and the timing is no accident. Ondo launched tokenized portfolios built on BlackRock strategies this week, with three portfolio tokens available on Ethereum and BNB Chain for eligible non-US investors. BlackRock supplies the investment models and Ondo manages the products. The BUIDL fund from BlackRock remains the largest tokenized treasury product by assets, a benchmark the rest of the market measures itself against.
South Korean brokerages are building tokenized securities platforms ahead of a government plan to tokenize securities in stages starting 2027, a reminder that the race is global rather than a Wall Street affair. NYSE parent ICE partnered with tZERO on infrastructure for tokenized securities earlier this month. Even exchanges outside crypto are positioning for a market where ownership records live on shared ledgers.
Ethereum keeps winning these mandates almost by default. It holds the largest share of tokenized real-world assets, has the deepest institutional tooling, and every major asset manager that has tokenized a fund so far started there. Competing chains get pilots and announcements. Ethereum gets the live assets, and the network effect compounds with each signing.
The Defiant reported this week that an Ethereum draft specification proposes compliance controls for confidential real-world asset tokens, keeping amounts private while preserving issuer enforcement powers. That work addresses one of the main objections institutions raise against public chains, namely that privacy and compliance pull in opposite directions. If the draft hardens into a standard, it could unlock a second wave of institutional issuance that current tooling does not accommodate.
What it changes
For investors, the practical change is access and liquidity. A $500 minimum and continuous transferability differ sharply from the five or ten figure commitments and multi-year lockups of a traditional venture fund. The tokenized shares are still subject to securities rules, and eligibility requirements apply. This is not permissionless DeFi. It is a regulated fund with a blockchain transfer agent, which is exactly the point.
Secondary liquidity is the harder question. A token that can move 24 hours a day still needs a buyer on the other side, and tokenized venture shares have thin markets so far. Securitize has built venues for its own products, and trading history there suggests demand exists but remains modest relative to the assets involved. Investors should treat transferability as a feature that exists on paper until depth appears in practice.
For the industry, the significance is the issuer. The firm led by Cathie Wood is one of the most retail-visible asset managers in the United States, with a brand built on betting early on disruptive technology. Its move signals that tokenized funds are graduating from crypto-native experiments to standard product lines. When the manager best known for innovation bets puts its own venture vehicle onchain, the question stops being whether tokenization works and becomes which fund goes next, and at what size.