Cathie Wood Eyes On-Chain Expansion for Ark Invest Funds Amid Regulatory Shifts

Cathie Wood, CEO of Ark Invest and an early proponent of crypto in traditional finance, is looking to bring some of her firm’s funds on-chain—once U.S. regulations make it feasible.

“We see tokenization as a game-changer,” Wood said at the Digital Asset Summit in New York on Tuesday. “We’d love to tokenize our Venture Fund (ARKVX) and Digital Asset Revolution Fund as soon as regulations allow.”

Wood expressed confidence that regulatory developments are trending in a direction that could enable Ark to capitalize on blockchain technology for fund management.

However, security token regulations remain unclear in the U.S., creating hurdles for firms like Ark Invest. Some analysts predict that once these issues are addressed, tokenization could become a multi-trillion-dollar industry by 2030.

Ark isn’t alone in exploring this space. Earlier this month, Coinbase executives hinted at their own tokenization ambitions. At the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media, and Telecom Conference, Coinbase CFO Alesia Haas revealed ongoing discussions with the SEC about launching a security token—a move that previously stalled in 2020 when Coinbase attempted to go public using a similar model.

Jesse Pollack, founder of Base, Coinbase’s Ethereum Layer 2 network, later clarified on X that while Coinbase is exploring tokenization, there are no concrete plans to tokenize $COIN just yet.

“We’re in the research phase, working to identify regulatory pathways that could allow assets like $COIN to move on-chain in a compliant and future-proof way,” Pollack stated.