Cathie Wood's ARK Invest is moving one of its flagship funds onto public blockchain infrastructure. The firm has partnered with tokenization platform Securitize to bring the $1.3 billion ARK Venture Fund onto Ethereum, marking the first time ARK has fully transferred a fund to blockchain rails.
The move gives investors an indirect, tokenized route into a portfolio that is heavily weighted toward private, unlisted companies. As of the end of August, the fund held 5.26% of its assets in OpenAI, 3.86% in Anthropic, and 4.16% in payments group Stripe. Overall, 74.15% of the fund's assets sit in private companies rather than publicly traded stock, giving retail-adjacent investors rare access to firms that would otherwise be reserved for institutional or late-stage venture capital.
The ARK Venture Fund concentrates its bets on artificial intelligence, space, robotics and fintech — sectors ARK has long championed as the core of its disruptive-innovation thesis. Tokenizing the fund does not change that underlying strategy; it changes how investors hold and access their stake in it.
Structure remains unchanged
Despite the move to Ethereum, the fund's legal and operational structure stays the same. The ARK Venture Fund is organized as an interval fund, meaning investors can only redeem shares through periodic repurchase offers rather than at will. Its shares are not listed on any traditional stock exchange, and ARK has said it does not expect the tokenized shares to trade on an ordinary secondary market either. In effect, tokenization changes the technical wrapper around the fund's shares without introducing the kind of continuous, exchange-based liquidity often associated with tokenized assets.
That distinction matters for European investors weighing the appeal of tokenized funds: putting a fund on-chain does not automatically mean shares can be bought or sold freely at any time. The interval structure, with its scheduled repurchase windows, remains the operative constraint on liquidity regardless of the blockchain layer beneath it.
Rapid asset growth
The tokenization comes as the fund's asset base has expanded sharply. Assets under management stood at $325 million at the end of September 2025 and reached $1.304 billion eleven months later — a figure ARK Invest describes as having nearly quadrupled in under a year.
For a European audience watching the convergence of traditional asset management and blockchain infrastructure, the ARK Venture Fund's move is notable less for its yield or novelty than for what it signals: a large, established US asset manager choosing Ethereum as the settlement layer for a fund built around access to some of the most closely watched private companies in artificial intelligence, including OpenAI and Anthropic.
