ARK Investment Management Asks SEC to Approve Blockchain-Tracked Share Class for Venture Fund

Cathie Wood's ARK Investment Management has asked the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to let its ARK Venture Fund issue a share class whose ownership is tracked on a distributed ledger, according to a filing on record with the agency. If the SEC signs off, ARK becomes one of the first regulated U.S. fund managers to offer tokenized shares under an actual exemptive order, not just a pilot program.

The Filing Timeline

ARK and the fund filed the initial application on May 20, 2026, amended it June 11, and filed a second amendment on August 7, under file number 812-16031, according to The Defiant and Cryptopolitan. The SEC published formal notice of the request on August 24, per those same outlets and a Gate News report, kicking off a comment period. Crypto Briefing and KuCoin reported the notice date as August 26, a minor discrepancy in an otherwise consistent timeline.

The deadline for interested parties to request a hearing is 5:30 p.m. Eastern time on September 18, 2026. Under standard SEC exemptive-order procedure, if no hearing is ordered by that point, the requested relief is deemed accepted, according to Cryptopolitan and Gate News.

What ARK Actually Wants

The application would amend a prior exemptive order ARK already holds, one granted in November 2025 that explicitly said the fund's shares "will not be listed on any securities exchange, nor quoted on any quotation medium," according to language quoted by The Defiant. ARK now wants to reverse that, adding two new share classes: an Exchange Class that lists on a national securities exchange and settles on a T+1 basis, and a Tokenized Class that records ownership using distributed ledger technology.

Tokenized Class shares could trade on SEC-registered alternative trading systems, other quotation mediums, or move peer-to-peer between whitelisted wallets, with every wallet required to clear KYC and AML checks, according to The Defiant and Cryptopolitan. Some tokenized transactions could settle same-day, on a T+0 basis. ARK is explicitly not asking for relief on how the blockchain technology itself works, and it is not seeking to list or quote the tokenized shares on decentralized finance platforms, per language in the filing cited by The Defiant.

ARK's existing share classes carry real costs: Class D (ARKVX) charges a 2.90% annual fee, Class S (ARKSX) charges 3.60% with up to a 3.50% sales load, and Class U (ARKUX) charges 3.50%, according to Cryptopolitan. Fee rates for the two new classes have not been set.

The Numbers Behind the Fund

ARK Venture Fund, a non-diversified closed-end interval fund organized as a Delaware statutory trust, held $562 million in total assets as of January 31, according to its semi-annual report cited by The Defiant. As of May 15, Class D, Class S and Class U shares priced between $49.69 and $49.83, for an aggregate non-affiliate market value of roughly $912.6 million. The fund is separate from the $6.55 billion ARK Innovation ETF, which sits in a different registrant, ARK ETF Trust, per The Defiant.

ARK also holds roughly $10 million in Securitize, a tokenization platform, as of late 2025, according to Crypto Briefing and KuCoin. OneBullex reported that ARK has no immediate plans to launch either new share class despite pursuing the filing now, framing the move as an effort to lock in regulatory clarity ahead of future products, though that characterization is OneBullex's own analysis rather than a stated ARK position.

The Case For and Against

Interval funds like this one currently lock investors into quarterly repurchase offers at roughly 5% of net asset value, with thin options for selling shares in between, according to Crypto Briefing. A working secondary market on registered ATS venues would give investors an exit they don't have today.

The fair counter-concern is that tokenizing a semi-liquid private-market fund doesn't change what's underneath it. Critics of rushing blockchain wrappers onto illiquid assets point out that a $500 minimum investment paired with a peer-to-peer trading option could put retail buyers into venture-style holdings they don't fully understand are still governed by quarterly repurchase limits at the fund level, whatever happens on secondary markets. No SEC ruling has been issued, and the source filings do not resolve how thin or reliable trading on those ATS venues would actually be at launch.

The regulatory backdrop suggests the SEC is moving toward accommodating this kind of structure generally. Three SEC divisions stated in January that "the format in which a security is issued... does not affect application of the federal securities laws," according to Cryptopolitan, and SEC Chairman Paul Atkins made further remarks on tokenization regulation on September 1.

The next concrete date is September 18, 2026, the deadline for anyone to request a hearing on ARK's application. If nobody does, the exemption is deemed accepted under standard procedure, and ARK, not BlackRock, not Fidelity, will hold the first template other fund managers copy.