Ark Invest CEO Cathie Wood Hopes to Tokenize Some of the Firm's Funds

Ark Invest CEO Cathie Wood, one of the earliest traditional financial investors in crypto, hopes to bring some of her company's funds on-chain

The role of blockchain in the future of investing was a key theme at the Digital Asset Summit in New York on Tuesday.

Among the speakers was Ark Invest CEO Cathie Wood, one of the earliest traditional financial investors in crypto, who discussed her hopes to bring some of her company's funds on-chain once the regulatory landscape allows companies in the U.S. to do so.

"We think tokenization is going to be huge," Wood said at the event. "We'd love to be able to tokenize our Venture Fund ( ARKVX ) or our [Digital Asset] Revolution Fund."

"I think the regulations are starting to open up in a way that will allow us to do that. So we'd like to seize the moment."

U.S. regulators have yet to provide a clear framework and rules for registering security tokens, making it difficult for entities like Ark to launch products in the booming space that some believe could become a multi-trillion-dollar market by the end of 2030.

Executives of Coinbase (NASDAQ:COIN), a big holding of Ark, had previously mentioned a similar outlook, although it was vague as companies are trying to make their mark in the tokenization industry.

At the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecom Conference earlier this month, Coinbase Chief Financial Officer Alesia Haas said that the crypto exchange is in talks with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to issue a security token, a move that previously failed when Coinbase attempted to go public with such a product in 2020.

Jesse Pollack, the founder of Base, the Ethereum Layer 2 network built by Coinbase, later said in a post on X that there were no "concrete plans" to tokenize Coinbase's stock.

"We are in an exploratory phase and working to understand what needs to be unlocked from a regulatory perspective to bring assets like $COIN to @base in a safe, compliant, future looking way," he stated.