Canary Capital breaks new ground with an NFT-inclusive crypto ETF featuring Pudgy Penguins

Canary Capital has filed an S-1 form with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to launch a crypto exchange-traded fund (ETF) that provides exposure to the PENGU token and the Pudgy Penguins non-fungible token (NFT) collection.

This marks the first crypto-related ETF offering connected to an NFT collection.

According to the filing, the fund will invest in a portfolio consisting of PENGU tokens and NFTs from the Pudgy Penguins collection. 

Additionally, the fund will hold Solana (SOL) and Ethereum (ETH), which the filing describes as “necessary or incidental to the purchase, sale, and transfer of the Trust’s PENGU and Pudgy Penguins NFTs.” 

PENGU, the native token of the Pudgy Penguins ecosystem, currently has a market capitalization of $435 million. One hour after the news, the token’s price jumped over 7% to $0.0073. In the same period, the floor price of the Pudgy Penguins NFTs jumped by over 0.5 ETH.

Luca Netz, CEO of Pudgy Penguins, acknowledged the filing, calling it “history.” Igloo Inc., the parent firm behind the Pedgy Penguins collection, added:

“We believe that Pudgy Penguins is the face of crypto, representing innovation and the mass adoption of blockchain technology. Being included in this filing is a strong validation of that belief.”

Historically out of the box

Canary Capital has a track record of unconventional crypto-related ETF filings. On November 12, 2024, the firm filed an S-1 form for the first Hedera (HBAR) ETF, which attracted attention as HBAR was outside the top 20 crypto by market capitalization. 

The move surprised some analysts, such as Bloomberg senior ETF analyst Eric Balchunas, who said using Google to understand what Hedera is.

This trend has continued in 2025. Canary filed the S-1 form for the first Axelar (AXL) ETF on March 5 and followed up with the first Sui (SUI) ETF filing on March 17, shortly after registering it in Delaware on March 6. 

These filings suggest a broader effort by Canary to expand the scope of crypto-related ETFs beyond traditional assets such as Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum, testing the waters with the SEC on how far the filings can go.

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