Asset manager Canary Capital has filed with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for an exchange-traded fund tracking PENGU, the governance token for the Pudgy Penguin. The ETF would hold both PENGU and Pudgy Penguin nonfungible tokens (NFT), as well as other cryptocurrencies, such as SOL and ETH, that may be necessary to the purchase, sale or transfer of PENGU and the associated NFTs.
Nashville, Tennessee-based Canary Capital filed an S-1 form with the SEC on March 20. This is the first proposed EFT that includes NFTs. The ETF will be structured as a trust that is expected to hold 80%-95% PENGU and 5%-15% NFTs. No custodian or exchange have been selected yet.
First they released the NFT, then plushies and now an ETF
There are 8,888 Pudgy Penguin NFTs that range in price on Open Seas from 9.86 ETH ($19,499 at the time of writing) to 9,000 ETH ($17.8 million), although all but three of the NFTs listed were selling for 500 ETH ($988,805) or less. According to the S-1, Canary Capital “will select which NFTs to purchase by considering factors such as price, relative rarity, perceived desirability of a particular NFTs traits and characteristics, and the overall collection value.”
The Pudgy Penguins NFT collection was launched in July 2021 on Ethereum. In May 2023, Pudgy Penguins signed with the WME talent agency. Retailer Walmart (and later others) has carried a line of stuffed toys called plushies depicting the penguins since September.
The PENGU token launched on Solana in December 2024 with an airdrop of 25.9% of the 88.89 billion tokens to NFT holders distributed according to the rarity of the holder’s NFTs, and other community members. It had an initial market cap of around $2.8 billion and traded on Binance, Bybit and OKX.
Canary Capital has faith in altcoins and their ETFs
Igloo, Canary Capital’s parent company, posted a statement on X, saying, in part, “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.”
Canary Capital has been a pioneer in altcoin ETFs. It has filed documents with the SEC to create ETFs tracking Litecoin, Hedera, Solana, and XRP.
PENGU “has very few identified use cases apart from a collector’s item, the S-1 noted. There is no guarantee that it will continue to gain in value, it added. The token opened at $0.00689 on March 20, hit a high for the day of $0.00732 at 4:00 p.m. GMT and sank to $0.00646 at the time of writing. Its all-time high of $0.0428 was reached on Jan.6, according to CoinGecko. It has a market cap of around $406 million and 24-hour trading volume of $161 million.
