Cathie Wood's ARK Tokenizes $1.3 Billion Venture Fund, Puts OpenAI and SpaceX Stakes on Ethereum

Cathie Wood's ARK Invest and Securitize Corp. announced on September 24, 2026 that they are putting the ARK Venture Fund (ARKVX) on the blockchain, according to a joint announcement carried by PR Newswire. The fund, which holds stakes in OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX, Stripe, Databricks and other private tech names, will be tokenized on Ethereum, with Securitize handling the on-chain issuance and investor experience.

What's Actually Happening

ARKVX is a $1.3 billion closed-end interval fund that launched in September 2022, according to securities.io, which cited ARK's fund page showing net assets of $1,304 million as of August 31, 2026. Its top holdings as of that date were SpaceX at 7.54%, Kalshi at 5.81%, Ayar Labs at 5.65%, OpenAI at 5.26%, Stripe at 4.16%, Anthropic at 3.86%, and Lila Sciences at 3.71%.

Tokenizing the fund does not tokenize OpenAI or SpaceX themselves. Securitize CEO Carlos Domingo told CoinDesk, as reported by Crypto News, that "the underlying assets will still remain private, but the investment of the end users will be liquid." Investors get a blockchain-based token representing their claim on the fund, not direct shares in the private companies.

Cathie Wood, ARK's founder, CEO and CIO, called the move part of a broader shift in capital markets. "Tokenizing the ARK Venture Fund puts our conviction in the evolution, if not revolution, of capital markets into practice," she said in the PR Newswire statement, adding that it's "a natural extension of our mission to democratize access to technologically enabled disruptive innovation."

The Fee Question

Per the fund's prospectus dated October 28, 2025, cited by securities.io, ARKVX charges a 2.75% management fee plus a 0.15% service fee, for total annual fund expenses of 3.49%. After contractual fee waivers, net expenses still run 2.90% a year. That's a steep price for exposure to companies most retail investors can't buy directly anyway. Putting the fund on Ethereum doesn't change that fee structure. It changes how the shares move, not what they cost to hold.

The Liquidity Catch

ARKVX is structured as a closed-end interval fund, meaning it periodically offers to repurchase a limited slice of shares rather than allowing investors to cash out anytime, the standard structure for this type of fund. Tokenization lets investors trade the tokens on secondary markets, but it doesn't automatically override the fund's own redemption terms with ARK itself.

Marketing this as bringing a venture fund "onchain to trade 24/7," as Bloomberg's headline framed it, is accurate for secondary token trading, but investors expecting the same liquidity as a stock should understand the fund's underlying private holdings, like OpenAI and Anthropic stakes, still don't have public market prices. Securitize says it will provide daily net asset value updates, according to KuCoin's coverage of the deal, but daily NAV on hard-to-value private stakes is itself a judgment call ARK's advisers make, not a market-clearing price.

Where This Fits the Bigger Picture

ARK's move follows a filing pattern documented by HTX Insights, which reported that ARK submitted an SEC application in early September 2026 seeking to list and enable tokenized trading of its Venture Fund shares, describing it as the start of "phase 2.0 for tokenized asset management products." The September 24 Securitize announcement appears to be that plan moving forward.

OneBullex's coverage of the earlier SEC filing muddied the picture, describing it vaguely as covering unspecified ARK funds and invoking the ARK Innovation ETF's holdings in Tesla, Coinbase and Block, which is a different, publicly traded ETF with no connection to the private-company venture fund at the center of this announcement. The PR Newswire release and Bloomberg's reporting are specific: this deal is about ARKVX, not ARK's exchange-traded funds.

Crypto News reported that the SEC recently unveiled a five-year "innovation exemption" allowing certain tokenized U.S. stocks to trade on specially designed onchain venues, giving firms like ARK a regulatory pathway to experiment. Citi analysts, cited in that same report, project tokenized securities could reach $5.5 trillion by 2030 in their base case. ARK's own stake in Securitize, made in October 2025 according to PR Newswire, means Wood has a direct financial interest in the tokenization platform succeeding, not just an ideological one.

Retail investors drawn in by "24/7 trading" headlines should understand they're still holding an interval fund wrapper with a near-3% expense ratio and no guaranteed path to cash out on demand. ARK and Securitize haven't disclosed a specific launch date for when tokenized ARKVX will actually begin trading on Ethereum.