The boundary between traditional finance and crypto is becoming increasingly difficult to define. Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest is putting its venture-capital strategy on Ethereum, while 21Shares is expanding regulated European access to two very different crypto assets: Zcash and ether.fi.
The moves show how blockchain infrastructure is increasingly being used not simply for cryptocurrencies, but for the packaging, distribution and ownership of investment products.
ARK Invest announced on September 24 that it had partnered with Securitize to tokenize the ARK Venture Fund, known as ARKVX, making it the first ARK fund to be brought onchain.
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The fund has approximately $1.3 billion in net assets and invests in private and public technology companies associated with disruptive innovation, including companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe and Databricks.
The important distinction is that ARK is not putting shares of those individual companies onto Ethereum. Instead, the blockchain represents investors’ interests in the ARK Venture Fund itself.
Securitize provides the infrastructure for issuance and investor access, while Ethereum becomes the settlement and ownership layer for the tokenized fund interests.
That distinction matters because tokenization is increasingly moving beyond the idea of putting existing cryptocurrencies onchain. The larger proposition is that traditional financial instruments—including funds.
Private-market investments and securities—can use blockchain infrastructure to record ownership and streamline parts of the investment process. For ARK, the move also extends an existing relationship with Securitize.
ARK invested strategically in Securitize in 2025, reflecting the investment manager’s broader interest in tokenized securities and blockchain-based capital markets. The venture-fund launch therefore represents an extension of an established strategy rather than an isolated experiment.
At the same time, 21Shares is pushing crypto further into conventional European brokerage infrastructure. On September 22, the asset manager launched physically backed exchange-traded products for Zcash and ether.fi on Euronext Amsterdam and Euronext Paris.
The products trade under the tickers ZCASH and ETHFI, respectively, and both carry a 2.50% annual fee. The significance of the products is their structure. Investors can obtain exposure through conventional brokerage accounts without directly purchasing, storing or managing the underlying tokens.
The products are physically backed, meaning the relevant crypto assets are held by institutional custodians rather than merely being represented by derivatives. Zcash brings another dimension to the expansion.
Known for privacy-preserving transactions, ZEC is now available through a regulated exchange-traded product structure in European markets. Ether.fi, meanwhile, represents the decentralized-finance and staking side of the digital-asset economy, giving traditional investors a security-market route to exposure to ETHFI.
The announcements point toward a broader transformation in crypto markets. ARK is bringing a traditional venture fund onto blockchain rails, while 21Shares is bringing individual digital assets into traditional European market infrastructure.
One direction moves financial assets toward blockchain infrastructure; the other moves blockchain assets toward established finance. The central question is no longer whether crypto and traditional finance will interact, but how deeply their infrastructures will converge.
Tokenization, regulated ETPs and institutional custody are creating that bridge, potentially making blockchain-based ownership increasingly familiar to investors who may never directly use a crypto wallet.