Cathie Wood is putting one of her investment funds on the blockchain for the first time, deepening her ties to the growing world of tokenized assets as Wall Street experiments with a new financial infrastructure.
The $1.3 billion ARK Venture Fund, which launched in 2022, is a closed-end interval fund that invests in some of the hottest public and private companies, like Anthropic, Kalshi Inc., Elon Musk’s SpaceX, as well as Stripe Inc., according to its website. The fund will be moved to the blockchain by Securitize Corp., a recently public tokenization platform in which ARK Invest has a stake, and it will be available on Ethereum.
The move comes as a confluence of factors makes tokenization increasingly viable, from greater regulatory clarity to more mature digital wallets and service-provider readiness.
“This is a milestone that’s been years and years in the making,” Tom Staudt, president and chief operating officer of ARK Invest, said in an interview.
While interval funds are more straightforward to build, they lack the global accessibility that exchange-traded funds offer, he said, which was a key reason they chose to focus on ARKVX. Much like money-market funds, shares are bought directly from the interval fund and redeemed in a predetermined window, rather than through the secondary markets where ETFs trade.
“This is our first step. So I don’t see this as the end of the road,” he said. “The goal is certainly to tokenize many” of ARK’s funds.
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The investment manager joins a slew of major financial firms that are putting traditional assets on blockchain networks, potentially changing how securities are issued, traded and settled. The value of tokenized real-world assets has surged more than 400% since the start of 2025, to roughly $39 billion, according to data provider RWA.xyz. Still, that figure is dwarfed by the trillions held in mutual funds and ETFs.
Advocates say putting traditional assets on blockchain could eventually enable faster settlement and lower costs while making it easier to trade fractional stakes and speeding up the shift toward around-the-clock trading. But some policymakers and market experts have raised concerns about the pace of adoption. The International Monetary Fund in an April report warned that tokenization could amplify financial crises.
To Staudt, it’s still early days for the industry with almost every major ETF provider working on tokenization. He attributed the low level of assets under management to limited product choice, friction in moving assets off traditional financial rails and the market’s early stage of development. But he views tokenization as an “inevitable outcome” and says all asset managers have a responsibility to have a business plan for this space.
“There are risks. I want to make that very clear,” he said. But financial innovation “that opens up financial services to more people has been criticized by those who have an entrenched interest in keeping things the way they are.”
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