Canary Capital files for spot PEPE ETF

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Canary Capital files for spot PEPE ETF

Highlights

Canary Capital has filed an S-1 to launch a spot Canary PEPE ETF in the US.
The fund would track the performance of Pepe, while up to 5% of assets could be temporarily held in ETH for network fees.
PEPE ranks 45th by market capitalization, but remains about 85% below its all-time high.
The 10 largest addresses control about 41% of the token supply, increasing concentration risk.

According to the S-1 form filed on April 8, the Canary PEPE ETF would track the token price minus expenses, with all of the trust’s PEPE held by a custodian. The filing states that a small share of the fund’s assets, up to 5%, may be temporarily held in ETH to cover fees on the Ethereum network, since PEPE itself is issued as an ERC-20 token.

A bet on the most speculative edge of the market

According to Cointelegraph, in structure, the filing follows the model already familiar from spot crypto ETFs: the fund would hold the underlying asset with a custodian, while share creation and redemption would take place in baskets of 10,000 shares. But unlike Bitcoin or Ether funds, this product is tied to a memecoin whose market logic is far less connected to fundamental factors. The prospectus itself explicitly warns that the fund’s shares are speculative and that investors could lose their entire investment.

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Canary is entering the market at a moment when PEPE itself is far removed from its earlier hype. According to CoinMarketCap, the token trades at around $0.000003, ranks 45th by market capitalization with a valuation of about $1.44 billion, and remains roughly 85% below its all-time high of $0.00002368 reached in December 2024. At the same time, the number of PEPE holders exceeds 513,500.

A fund built on an asset with concentrated ownership

Another risk highlighted by the issuer itself is the ownership structure of the token. In the filing, Canary says that the 10 largest wallet addresses controlled about 41% of PEPE’s circulating supply. The document notes that a significant portion of those addresses may belong to centralized exchanges, but even with that caveat, the concentration remains high for an asset being proposed in ETF form for broad-market investors.

The broader context is not entirely favorable either. Canary has already filed for ETFs tied to XRP, Solana, Hedera, Sei, and Mog Coin, clearly betting on an expanding lineup of niche crypto funds. Still, experience with memecoin-based ETFs has not yet looked especially convincing. According to Cointelegraph, the debut of Grayscale’s spot Dogecoin ETF in November 2025 generated just $1.4 million in first-day trading volume, far below Bloomberg analyst Eric Balchunas’s forecast of $12 million.

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A new test for the crypto ETF market

Canary’s filing matters not only on its own, but also as an indicator of how far issuers are willing to push the ETF wrapper toward increasingly volatile and weakly institutionalized tokens. If the SEC does not block this route early, the market could take it as a signal that after BTC and ETH, memecoins may gradually enter the universe of regulated products as well.

But even in that case, the fund’s success is far from guaranteed: it will require not only regulatory clearance, but real investor demand, and the Dogecoin example suggests that a high-profile ticker does not automatically translate into strong trading volume.

In an earlier report, we noted that Bitcoin holds near $71,000 as Iran ceasefire falters.

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