ARK Wants a Tokenized Share Class for Its Venture Fund, and the SEC Has a Date

ARK Invest has an exemptive application pending at the Securities and Exchange Commission that would let its ARK Venture Fund create a new share class whose ownership is recorded using distributed ledger technology, The Defiant reported. Shares of that class would trade on registered alternative trading systems, the SEC-licensed venues that match trades in securities outside a national exchange. Requests for a hearing on the application are due by 18 September.

An exemptive application is a request for relief from specific provisions of the Investment Company Act, the 1940 statute that governs registered funds. That is a different route from most tokenization efforts, which either wrap an existing security in a derivative or issue offshore. Here the fund itself would carry a share class that lives on a ledger, inside the existing registered-fund regime.

Why the plumbing is the point

A registered fund's transfer agent keeps the official record of who owns what. Replacing that record with entries on a distributed ledger changes who maintains the register and how transfers settle, which is the reason relief is needed rather than a simple filing. It also means the resulting token would not be a reference note or a synthetic. It would be the share class.

That is a materially different instrument from the tokenized stocks that have dominated this year's flow. Those give economic exposure through an issuer's own obligation. A tokenized share class of a registered fund is the fund's own equity, with the fund's disclosure regime and the fund's board attached to it.

The venue question

Trading on alternative trading systems rather than a decentralised exchange is the other constraint worth reading closely. ATS venues have registration, surveillance and access rules, which means participation is gated in a way that a public blockchain pool is not. The ledger, in this design, is the recordkeeping layer, not the market.

ARK Venture Fund holds private company positions, which are illiquid by nature. A share class that settles on a ledger does not make the underlying assets more liquid, and nothing in the application changes what the fund owns.

What 18 September actually is

The hearing deadline is a procedural marker, not a decision. It sets the date by which interested parties can ask the Commission for a hearing on the application. Silence from objectors does not equal approval, and approval would come as an order on its own timetable.

If the order does arrive, the read-across is broader than one fund. Any registered fund could point to the precedent when asking to record a share class on a ledger, which is a more consequential path into onchain markets than another offshore wrapper. That is the thing to watch after the 18th: not whether ARK gets an answer, but how narrowly it is written.