Canary Capital Filed the First Proposed U.S. Spot HBAR ETF

Canary Capital filed a Form S-1 registration statement for the Canary HBAR ETF with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on November 12, 2024. The proposal would place HBAR, the native asset of the Hedera Network, in an exchange-traded product holding the asset directly. Contemporaneous specialist coverage described it as the first proposed U.S. spot HBAR ETF.

The filing mattered because it pushed the U.S. crypto-product pipeline beyond bitcoin and ether and toward a smaller network asset. It also moved Canary’s HBAR strategy from a private trust for eligible accredited participants, announced on October 1, 2024, toward a vehicle intended for the public securities market.

The development was a proposal, not an approval. SEC EDGAR records show that the filing was accepted at 12:20:36 Eastern time on November 12 under accession number 0001999371-24-014510 and file number 333-283135. EDGAR acceptance placed the documents on the public record; it did not make the registration statement effective, authorize an exchange listing or permit shares to begin changing hands.

What Canary proposed

The preliminary prospectus said the trust would seek to reflect the value of its HBAR holdings, less operating expenses and other liabilities. Net asset value would reference a U.S.-dollar HBAR benchmark based on aggregated executed trade flow from major digital-asset platforms. The benchmark language still appeared partly in brackets, another sign that the document was preliminary.

The proposed trust would hold actual HBAR. It would not hold HBAR futures or other derivatives, and its assets would not be loaned, pledged or used as collateral. Authorized participants would deliver cash for new share baskets and receive cash for redeemed baskets; the trust would arrange the corresponding HBAR purchases or sales.

That cash-based design separated the product from direct wallet ownership while introducing a chain of sponsor, benchmark, custody and market-service dependencies. The filing warned about HBAR volatility, benchmark disruption, premiums or discounts between share price and net asset value, network problems, custody failures and regulatory uncertainty. Those were issuer disclosures, not Coinburn forecasts.

The prospectus also said the trust would not be registered under the Investment Company Act of 1940. Accordingly, the product would not carry the protections attached to a fund registered under that statute. The document alternated between “exchange-traded fund” and “exchange-traded product,” making its disclosed regulatory structure more informative than the familiar ETF label alone.

The blanks defined the uncertainty

Several terms needed to evaluate an operating product were missing on November 12. The proposed exchange and ticker were blank. So were the HBAR custodian, transfer agent, cash custodian, basket size, seed-capital details and annual sponsor fee. The filing said the preliminary prospectus could change and that sales could not occur until the registration statement became effective.

The S-1 also was not an exchange rule-change proposal. A venue would still have to seek permission to list and trade the shares. Consequently, the November 12 record established Canary’s intended structure and formal regulatory step, but not a launch date, fee, liquidity level, assets under management or probability of clearance.

What was knowable on November 12

The “first” characterization comes from contemporaneous and near-contemporaneous specialist reporting, supported by the absence of an earlier HBAR-specific U.S. filing in the records reviewed for this reconstruction. It is not a universal SEC classification.

The narrower conclusion is fully documented: Canary formally proposed a direct-HBAR exchange-traded product on November 12, 2024, and disclosed its early design and risks. No approval, effective registration, exchange listing or launch had occurred by that date. Later amendments and product outcomes are outside this event-day account.