ARK Invest Tokenizes $1.3B Venture Fund Holding OpenAI and Anthropic Stakes

ARK Invest is moving its venture fund onchain. We're talking about $1.3 billion in assets. Among them are stakes in OpenAI, Anthropic, and Stripe.

What happened

The company announced the move on September 24, 2026. Cathie Wood's firm is tokenizing the ARK Venture Fund, also known as ARKVX. Securitize is the partner, and the tokens themselves will be issued on the Ethereum network. That means fund shares get a digital counterpart that can be held and transferred like an ordinary crypto asset.

ARKVX isn't a new product. The fund has spent years investing in private companies before they go public, and unlike classic venture funds, it has historically accepted investors with a far lower entry threshold than the traditional funds reserved for institutions and wealthy individuals. It's precisely through ARKVX that retail investors got any access at all to names like OpenAI or Anthropic, which haven't gone public. The structure itself isn't changing. ARKVX remains what's called an interval fund. You can buy in almost anytime, but the fund only allows redemptions periodically, on a schedule, rather than on demand like a regular exchange-traded ETF. What changes is simply how an investor holds and transfers their stake. Instead of an entry in the manager's registry, there's now a token in a blockchain wallet.

Why OpenAI, Anthropic, and Stripe specifically

These three companies weren't picked at random. OpenAI and Anthropic lead the race in generative AI, and their valuations have long been measured in tens of billions of dollars. Both labs have raised billions in private rounds for years, but neither has announced concrete plans to go public. Stripe processes payments for thousands of companies and remains one of the world's most expensive private fintech firms, even though rumors of its IPO have circulated for years. The company has been around for more than a decade and became an industry standard well before those rumors started. For comparison, classic venture funds at this level are usually open only to institutional investors with minimum checks in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

An ordinary investor can't buy shares in any of these companies directly. Such companies aren't required to disclose financial statements and don't trade on exchanges. ARKVX has gotten around that limit since its founding. The fund buys stakes on the private market, and its investors get indirect exposure through fund units. Tokenization adds another layer on top. Now those units can theoretically sit in the same wallet as Bitcoin or other digital assets, and potentially move without any paperwork.

Where Securitize fits in

Securitize has spent several years tokenizing traditional financial products and is registered with US regulators as a transfer agent and broker-dealer. It isn't a crypto startup out of a garage. It's a licensed company operating under the same rules as classic securities registrars. BlackRock is among its clients too: that company's tokenized money-market fund, BUIDL, also runs on Securitize's technology.

The platform handles the legal side of the issuance: investor verification, an ownership registry, and compliance with regulatory requirements. The tokenized shares still legally remain the same fund registered with the regulator, not a separate crypto product outside oversight. The blockchain here acts as infrastructure, not a marketing label. Tokenized shares can be checked onchain, transferred to a new owner without paperwork, and potentially settled faster than through a traditional transfer agent, which sometimes needs days to process a transaction through a chain of intermediaries. Onchain, that process can theoretically take minutes. For ARK Invest, it's also a way to bring a crypto-native audience closer to its products. Cathie Wood has publicly backed Bitcoin and bitcoin ETFs for years, and now she's offering that same audience a token tied to a venture fund.

Who this affects

For an ordinary investor in Ukraine, this launch doesn't open direct access just yet. Tokenized ARKVX shares are aimed at the US market and restricted by investor requirements, including identity and source-of-funds checks. But the trend is bigger than one fund. The past few months show traditional financial players moving their products onchain one after another, and each new step makes it less of an exception and more of an industry norm. Just a couple of years ago, tokenization was mostly associated with niche startups. Now names like BlackRock and ARK Invest are joining in, and that shifts both how regulators view the technology and how willing big players are to experiment.

• Banks are tokenizing deposits for instant settlement between each other.
• Exchanges are issuing tokenized stocks for round-the-clock trading with no days off.
• Asset managers are moving money-market funds onto blockchain rails.
• Crypto exchanges are adding tokenized instruments alongside familiar coins.

ARK Invest is adding venture capital to that list, the least liquid and most closed-off segment of traditional finance. If the format catches on, tokenized shares of other private-company funds could follow, and the entry threshold for retail investors in such assets will likely keep dropping. For the crypto market, it's also a signal: big players from traditional finance are willing to work on the same blockchain rails that DeFi protocols have used for years.

What comes next

For now, ARKVX's tokenization remains more of a pilot step than a mass-market product for retail investors. A $1.3 billion volume is large by the standards of a single venture fund, but tiny next to the entire tokenized-asset market. Regulatory requirements for investors aren't going away, they're just moving into a new format. The first tokenized money-market funds also started as small pilots, and now they manage billions.

The simple fact that a stake in OpenAI or Anthropic now exists as a blockchain token shows how fast traditional finance and the crypto market are converging. The company's next steps, not this first launch, will show whether tokenization becomes a real alternative to classic fund ownership or stays a niche experiment for a narrow group of investors willing to deal with a new format for access to a few big names in the portfolio. For now, it's more a signal of direction than a finished product for the mass market. The market will be watching mainly for whether real buy-and-sell trades in these tokens show up, not just the fact that they were issued.