Canary Capital is taking the ETF playbook deeper into meme-coin territory. The asset manager has filed an S-1 registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for a proposed Canary PEPE ETF, a fund designed to hold PEPE directly while maintaining a small ETH (CRYPTO: $ETH) balance strictly to cover network fees and transaction costs.
What gives the filing more shape is what it says about where issuer appetite is moving. Crypto ETFs have already expanded well beyond bitcoin-only exposure, but a PEPE filing pushes that logic toward a part of the market that has traditionally been treated as more speculative than institutional.
That does not mean approval is close or guaranteed. It does mean at least one issuer believes there is enough investor attention, liquidity and market identity around PEPE to justify wrapping it in a public-market vehicle.
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The filing says the trust would issue and redeem shares in 10,000-share baskets and could accept either cash or in-kind PEPE through authorized participants. As of April 8, the registration statement described PEPE as the 45th-largest digital asset by market capitalization, with an estimated market cap of about $1.48 billion. That gives the proposed fund a more concrete market backdrop than a headline built only on meme-coin momentum.
For now, the filing is still just the opening move. But it adds another signal that the crypto ETF race is no longer stopping at the assets that already carry the strongest institutional brand.
As the wrapper keeps widening, the next question may be less about whether a memecoin can get filed for and more about how far public-market demand is actually willing to follow.
Pepe (CRYPTO: $PEPE) is currently trading at about $0.0000041 U.S. per digital token.
