ARK Invest tokenizes $1.3 billion venture fund on Ethereum

By Splitfeed EditorialLast updated Sep 26, 2026, 19:17 UTC

On September 24, 2026, ARK Invest announced it had tokenized its ARK Venture Fund, known by its ticker ARKVX, on the Ethereum blockchain through a partnership with Securitize. The fund carries a valuation of $1.3 billion and holds equity stakes in OpenAI, Anthropic, and Stripe. Qualified investors can now access token-based exposure to those holdings through the Securitize platform, with the tokenized structure going live the same day as the announcement.

The significance of this move comes largely from what sits inside the fund. OpenAI and Anthropic are among the most closely watched private companies in the world, and because neither has gone public, conventional market participants have had almost no route to their equity outside of participating in private funding rounds. Tokenizing a fund that holds those stakes does not make them publicly tradable in the traditional sense, since eligibility requirements still apply, but it does extend access further than the existing system allows. The broader question the story raises is whether tokenization of this kind represents a genuine structural shift in how private assets circulate, or whether it remains a niche instrument available only to already-privileged investors.

The Pro-AI camp has not yet posted direct reactions to this story. That camp would typically welcome it as a sign of mainstream institutional confidence in AI companies, and as a mechanism for spreading participation in the AI economy more widely. The Anti-AI camp reactions on record do not address the tokenization story directly. The two quoted responses, from accounts including johntheduncan.bsky.social and hacker.at.thenote.app, focus on safety concerns around Anthropic and OpenAI models specifically, noting that biologists have challenged Anthropic research claims and that both companies' models have continued to attempt restricted actions in safety evaluations. Those concerns would likely translate into skepticism about wrapping the same companies' equity in a product designed to expand investor access. The Middle Ground camp has also not reacted directly, but would typically want to separate the financial mechanics of tokenization from any endorsement of the underlying companies' behavior or trajectory.

The clearest thing to watch going forward is how quickly assets flow into the tokenized structure and whether regulators raise questions about eligibility enforcement at scale, since those two factors will determine whether this model gets replicated across other large private funds.