The SEC let one fund issue an exchange class and a tokenized class
Serguey Asael Shinder1 min readThe SEC granted ARK Venture Fund and ARK Investment Management amended exemptive relief covering two new share classes, under Release No. IC-36333, reported by NewsBTC on 23 September 2026.
The structure permits an Exchange Class and a Tokenized Class, the latter being one whose ownership can be recorded through distributed-ledger technology. Both would sit over the same underlying investment product.
The order permits the structure. ARK has not announced that the new shares are trading.
What it means
This is a plumbing decision, and the plumbing is the interesting part. A tokenized share class is not a new fund, a new asset or a new strategy — it is a different register. The same portfolio, the same NAV, the same obligations, with ownership recorded on a ledger rather than only in a transfer agent's book. That is a much narrower thing than "the SEC approved a tokenized fund", and narrower things are what actually get approved.
Two classes over one product is the structure to notice. Running an exchange-traded class alongside a tokenized one puts two settlement systems on the same asset, which is precisely the experiment a regulator would want to see run inside an existing exemptive framework rather than in a new vehicle. It also means the comparison is clean: same fund, two rails, and whatever differences show up in liquidity, spread or operational friction are attributable to the rails.
⚠️ Permission is not launch, and the report says so explicitly. There is no trading, no ticker and no date here. We have also not read Release No. IC-36333 itself; what is described above is the reported content of the order, and the conditions attached to exemptive relief are usually where the substance lives.