.jpg)
ARK Investment Management just asked the SEC for something deceptively small that would be a genuinely large precedent: approval to add a tokenized share class to an existing $562 million venture fund, letting investors trade fund shares peer-to-peer through approved wallets. The application, File 812-16031, amends a November 2025 exemptive order under the Investment Company Act of 1940, and it is structured to move through the SEC's existing relief process rather than waiting for the commission's proposed tokenization frameworks to become final. If approved, a regulated fund's shares would circulate on-chain, on evenings and weekends, between whitelisted wallets, with BNY Mellon continuing as transfer agent.
The fund in question is a $562 million unlisted interval fund with an aggregate non-affiliate market value of $912.6 million across its share classes, priced near $49.70 to $49.83 per share depending on class. ARK proposes a Tokenized Class trading via Regulation ATS and peer-to-peer transfers among approved wallets, sitting alongside an exchange-listed class. The mechanics matter more than the size: an interval fund's liquidity problem is the interval, and a tokenized class with ATS and P2P rails gives shareholders a secondary market that traditional fund clearing never offered. The SEC's hearing request deadline is Sept. 18, with comments on the broader Reg Crypto Assets proposal due Oct. 20 and the transfer agent proposal Nov. 3, a regulatory runway ARK clearly intends to catch.
"Applicants are not seeking exemptive relief with respect to whether or how distributed ledger technology is used by a Fund to maintain a record of its shareholders." — ARK SEC filing footnote
Why This Filing Is Smarter Than It Looks
The quiet brilliance is in that footnote. ARK is not asking the SEC to bless blockchain share registries, the contentious part; it is asking for permission to let existing shares MOVE on-chain while the official record stays with BNY Mellon. That carve-out removes the hardest objection from the debate and leaves only the transfer question, which the 1940 Act's Section 17(d) and Rule 17d-1 machinery already handles. It is the same incrementalist playbook that grew the altcoin ETF category to $345M in assets and drove spot Bitcoin ETFs from filing to fixture: ask for the narrowest relief that creates a new market. Cathie Wood's firm also holds direct exposure to the plumbing, carrying Securitize equity plus a $10 million 5% convertible note maturing September 2028, so the filing doubles as demand for its own portfolio position.
The skeptical case: tokenized fund shares are a solution searching for an interval-fund-sized problem, and peer-to-peer transfer between approved wallets is a permissioned database wearing a chain. True enough. But permissioned is the point, because the SEC does not approve anything else, and a fund share that trades after hours is a real improvement over one that does not trade at all. The 24/7 tokenized trading framework the commission has proposed is still a proposal; ARK's version could be live under existing law.
Watch the Sept. 18 docket. If the SEC grants the amendment without a hearing, every fund manager with an exemptive order will file the same paperwork within the quarter, and tokenized fund shares stop being an ARK experiment and become a standard appendix.
