SEC Clears ARK Venture Fund For Tokenized And Exchange-Traded Share Classes

TL;DR

• The SEC granted ARK Venture Fund amended exemptive relief covering two new share classes.
• The structure allows an Exchange Class and a Tokenized Class whose ownership can be recorded through distributed-ledger technology.
• The order permits the structure, but ARK has not announced that the new shares are already trading.

ARK Venture Fund has secured an SEC order that gives it room to experiment with two very different distribution rails for the same underlying investment product.

Release No. IC-36333 grants ARK Venture Fund and ARK Investment Management amended exemptive relief under the Investment Company Act, allowing the fund to create an Exchange Class and a Tokenized Class.

One Fund, Two New Ways To Hold It

The Exchange Class is designed for listing on a national securities exchange.

The Tokenized Class goes a step further. Ownership records for those shares can be maintained using distributed-ledger technology, with trading potentially taking place through alternative trading systems.

That is a meaningful distinction from simply putting a fund ticker onchain as a marketing layer. The SEC order addresses the legal structure needed for a registered fund to maintain a tokenized class alongside conventional fund interests.

It also gives ARK a route to test whether blockchain-based ownership records can coexist with the transfer, custody and investor-protection requirements that already apply to registered investment companies.

Permission Is Not The Same As A Launch

There is an important line to keep around the announcement.

The SEC has granted the exemptive order. It has not announced that ARK’s Tokenized Class is already live on an ATS, and ARK has not set an immediate commercial launch date in the material validated for this report.

That makes this a regulatory infrastructure story rather than a product-launch story.

Still, the order is notable because tokenized funds are increasingly moving from bespoke private-market experiments into structures designed to sit inside established securities law.

ARK now has regulatory clearance to build those new share classes. The next question is when it decides to put them into actual circulation.

This article was written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.