Securitize Takes Cathie Wood’s ARK Venture Fund Onchain, Offering Exposure to OpenAI, Anthropic and Stripe

Jennifer Sanasie (0:06)

This morning, we learned that ARK's Venture Fund is getting tokenized by Securitize. I'm here with Securitize CEO, Carlos Domingo. Congratulations.

Carlos Domingo (0:14)

Thank you. Very exciting news.

Jennifer Sanasie (0:15)

I feel like every time I talk to you, you're announcing something new, and it's a very exciting time for you.

Carlos Domingo (0:20)

It's my job to get things done, announce new projects and get more things done.

Jennifer Sanasie (0:23)

All right. Why this specific fund and why now?

Carlos Domingo (0:27)

Well, this specific fund is super interesting for a variety of reasons. First, is retail available?

Most retail investors don't have access to these high-quality funds like the ARK Ventures Fund. It's a fund that contains a combination of publicly traded companies like Securitize and SpaceX and others, but also private companies that people are really looking after, like Anthropic, OpenAI, FigureAI, et cetera. It's going to be curated by Cathie Wood and Lorenzo and the whole ARK team, which obviously they're very well known for choosing the best innovative companies for their products.

Jennifer Sanasie (1:03)

I know it's launching on Ethereum first. Securitize has historically been multi-chain. Any plans for more chains as we move forward?

Carlos Domingo (1:11)

I'm pretty sure we'll be expanding to other chains. We tend to start with Ethereum because it's the largest chain and the most established, but as you know, we work with many other chains and we would like to have our products to be multi-chain in all the other ones that we work with.

Jennifer Sanasie (1:24)

You mentioned bringing this product to retail investors. What should retail investors know about the now tokenized fund?

Carlos Domingo (1:33)

The holdings of the fund are public, so that you can actually go to the ARK Ventures website and you can see exactly what is the composition of the companies that are there and then understand that you're also getting a diversified portfolio, so it's less risky. Let's say just buying a single stock, whether it's private or public. Then the second thing is that we're going to be providing a daily NAF, so you don't know on a daily basis how the price changes. We're going to be training it on chain so it will become liquid. So it's actually, I think, a great product for retail to get exposure to both public and private high-tech companies.

Jennifer Sanasie (2:04)

I want to mention some of the private companies that are part of the fund, OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe, some of those names. Does putting the fund on chain eventually make exposure to those private assets more liquid?

Carlos Domingo (2:15)

It gives them some exposure because the fund is a diversified fund, which I think is probably better than just betting on a single company. So if you don't know whether OpenAI or Anthropic are going to win the AI race, here you get both of them in a diversified pool, and the fund itself will be liquid. The underlying assets will still remain private, but the investment of the end users will be liquid.

Jennifer Sanasie (2:36)

Now, there's a big debate happening. I'm sure you've been following it after AMC CEO came out and made those comments about tokenized equities. I want to talk about your perspective there. Do you think that companies should have a say when their equities are being tokenized, even in a fund like this?

Carlos Domingo (2:54)

I think, look, there's those two ways of tokenizing, right? There is the issuer consent, where the issuer gives you the consent, and there is the derivative products, like this fund that contains equity in a variety of companies. There is things like ETFs, options, et cetera, that are derivative products that do not require issuer consent. So I think the framing of whether it requires issuer consent or not is the wrong one. The right framing, which actually the CEO of AMC said, is whether the products, these derivatives, are actually regulated in the US and fully legal or not.

And the reality is that most of these wrapper products or synthetics that are being done offshore, they are unregulated products. So I think that the AMC CEO has a point on complaining about people creating unregulated products out of their equity.

Jennifer Sanasie (3:37)

Do you think that there's... I guess we talk so much about education when we talk about crypto and what crypto enables and the underlying technology. Does that education now need to be extended to CEOs and CFOs when we talk about tokenization and some of these new developments that you and I talk about all the time?

Carlos Domingo (3:55)

I certainly think so. I think now tokenization is a word that is out there, like everybody's talking about. Like you and I have been doing interviews for years, and now it's like everybody talks about tokenization. But I think there's still a bit of a misunderstanding about what it is, what it represents, and the fact that there is many multiple models of tokenization and some things that are US regulated, some offshore staff, etc.