Ark Invest's Cathie Wood Says She's Planning to Move Her Company's Funds to Blockchain
Earlier this month, Coinbase executives hinted at similar tokenization intentions amid expectations for a clearer regulatory framework.
Author: Helen Brown | Edited by: Stephen Alpher Updated: 19 Mar 2025 19:47 UTC Published: 18 Mar 2025 19:34 UTC
What you need to know:
- Ark Invest CEO Cathie Wood plans to tokenize the company's funds as soon as it becomes legal to do so in the U.S., a sign of the growing trend of asset tokenization.
- Coinbase, a major holding company of Ark Invest, is also considering issuing security tokens, but currently has no concrete plans due to ongoing negotiations with the SEC.
- Regulatory uncertainty continues to hold back tokenization efforts in the U.S., despite projections that the market could grow to trillions of dollars by 2030.
Ark Invest CEO Cathie Wood, one of the first traditional financial investors in cryptocurrency, hopes to move some of her company's funds to the blockchain once the US regulatory framework allows it.
“We think tokenization is going to be huge,” Wood said at the Digital Asset Summit in New York on Tuesday. “We’d love to be able to tokenize our Venture Fund (ARKVX) or our [Digital Asset] Revolution Fund.”
“I think the rules are starting to evolve in a way that will allow us to do that. So we're looking to seize the moment,” she added.
US regulators have yet to develop a clear framework and rules for registering security tokens, making it difficult for companies like Ark to launch products in a rapidly growing sector that some believe could grow into a multi-trillion dollar market by the end of 2030.
Executives at Coinbase, a major Ark holding company, have previously expressed similar views, though they have been rather vague as companies try to establish themselves in the tokenization space.
At Morgan Stanley's Technology, Media, and Telecom Conference earlier this month, Coinbase CFO Alesia Haas revealed that the crypto exchange is in talks with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) about issuing a security token, a move that previously failed when Coinbase tried to bring such a product to market in 2020.
Jesse Pollack, the founder of Base, the Ethereum Layer 2 network created by Coinbase, later stated in a post on X that there were “no concrete plans” to tokenize Coinbase shares.
“We are in the research phase and working to understand what needs to be done from a regulatory perspective to safely, compliantly, and future-proof assets like $COIN to @base,” he wrote.
