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Canary Capital Files an S-1 Registration Statement with the US SEC for Spot PEPE ETF

By
Paul Ugbede Godwin
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0

Canary Capital recently filed an S-1 registration statement with the SEC for a proposed spot PEPE ETF (Canary PEPE ETF). The filing aims to create an exchange-traded fund that would hold actual PEPE tokens to give investors direct exposure through traditional brokerage accounts.

The ETF would track the market price of PEPE by holding the underlying meme coin directly (spot exposure), similar to existing Bitcoin and Ethereum spot ETFs. Shares would be created and redeemed in baskets of 10,000 units. PEPE holdings would be held by a designated custodian for security. Canary Capital has a pattern of filing S-1s for various altcoins and meme coins.

These are often seen as flow tests or publicity moves to gauge interest in speculative assets, rather than guaranteed launches. Approval is uncertain and could face regulatory hurdles given PEPE’s meme nature and lack of utility.

The full S-1 is publicly available on the SEC’s EDGAR site. It includes the prospectus, risks; volatility, custody issues, regulatory uncertainty, no utility of the asset, etc., and operational details. This is just the initial S-1 filing — not approval. The SEC review process can take months or longer for novel products like meme coin ETFs, with potential amendments.

PEPE’s price showed little positive reaction or even dipped amid broader market sentiment, as many view these filings as speculative rather than immediate catalysts. This fits into growing interest in meme coin ETFs following Dogecoin-related moves and others like BONK, testing how far Wall Street and regulators will go with high-risk, community-driven assets.

PEPE ETF approval odds are currently very low — widely viewed by analysts and prediction markets as a long-shot “test” filing rather than a high-probability product. The Canary Capital S-1 was filed on April 8, 2026, and represents an early, preliminary step with no formal SEC decision timeline yet.

Polymarket’s contract for PEPE ETF trades at effectively 0% probability based on recent crowd-sourced pricing. This reflects skepticism that a meme coin lacking utility will clear regulatory hurdles quickly, if at all. Reports describe approval odds for pure meme coin ETFs like PEPE as low or at the very low end.

This contrasts sharply with higher-confidence assets: Analysts have pegged odds near 75–100% in some cases, thanks to clearer paths post-Bitcoin and Ethereum precedents and evolving SEC interpretive guidance on crypto. Even Dogecoin has seen fluctuating odds previously 75%+, later dropping to ~44% in older markets, and a Grayscale Dogecoin Trust ETF has launched in some form.

PEPE, however, faces extra scrutiny due to its pure hype-driven nature, high volatility, and ~80% drawdown from peaks. Many outlets frame Canary’s move along with their prior MOG, PENGU filings as a flow tes  or publicity play to gauge institutional interest and push regulatory boundaries, rather than an imminent launch. The SEC will likely focus on investor protection risks: extreme price swings, potential manipulation, custody challenges for a low-utility token, liquidity concentration, and lack of a regulated futures market for hedging.

Launched as a joke with no defined utility, governance, or revenue model. The prospectus itself notes this. Regulators prioritize protecting retail investors from highly speculative assets. This is just an S-1 registration. For ETFs, a 19b-4 exchange listing rule change is often also needed, though recent shifts have made some processes more streamlined for certain cryptos.

Review can take months to over a year, with comment periods, amendments, and possible denials. No public SEC comments on this filing yet. Spot Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs succeeded after years of effort and court wins. Altcoin ETFs are advancing faster in 2026 amid a more crypto-friendly environment, but meme-specific products remain fringe.

Even if some meme exposure emerges, a pure spot PEPE ETF is seen as testing limits. PEPE price was muted or slightly down post-filing, suggesting traders aren’t heavily pricing in approval. A broader wave of altcoin ETF approvals could create precedent and momentum. Stronger overall crypto market sentiment, higher PEPE liquidity and volume, or clearer SEC guidance on non-security tokens might help. Canary’s strategy appears aimed at being first-mover in niche meme products.

Perplexity’s AI Montly Revenue Jumped Approximately 50% in one Month

By
Paul Ugbede Godwin
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0

Perplexity AI’s monthly revenue jumped approximately 50% in one month, pushing its estimated annual recurring revenue (ARR) above $450 million as of March 2026.

The surge followed Perplexity’s strategic pivot from its core AI-powered search and chatbot experience toward autonomous AI agents that can perform complex tasks on behalf of users e.g., executing workflows rather than just answering questions. A major catalyst was the launch of Perplexity Computer, an agentic tool, combined with a shift to usage-based pricing, charging for heavy usage beyond subscription credits.

This model appears to have unlocked significantly higher monetization from power users and enterprises. Perplexity had been scaling rapidly but at a more measured pace, estimates around $100–200M ARR earlier in 2025, with some projections of ~$232M for 2025 overall.

The 50% monthly jump represents one of its sharpest accelerations to date, moving it into a much higher league for an AI startup. This development highlights a broader trend in the AI industry: the shift from chatbots/search which compete heavily with free tools like Google or basic LLMs to agentic systems that deliver tangible productivity gains and justify premium, usage-tied pricing.

Users seem willing to pay more when AI doesn’t just inform but acts. Perplexity isn’t alone—similar momentum is visible elsewhere with venture funding heavily tilting toward agent-related technologies. However, Perplexity still faces challenges, including ongoing publisher lawsuits over how its search features handle content and competition from bigger players.

The numbers come primarily from a Financial Times report citing internal figures, and they’ve been widely corroborated across tech outlets. It’s an impressive short-term validation of the agents are the future thesis, though sustaining that velocity will depend on execution, retention, and how well the agents perform in real-world use.

Low adoption e.g., <20 PRs/month per dev leads to poor returns. Some teams see gains in velocity but struggle to translate to overall delivery metrics without proper tooling and telemetry. One RCT on experienced open-source devs found AI including Claude increased completion time by 19% in some setups, possibly due to review overhead or slop code requiring rework.

Costs can escalate: Opus-heavy usage burns tokens faster; optimization like outing simple tasks to Sonnet/Haiku, prompt caching, model switching is essential for positive ROI. Some power users report high personal compute value, but enterprise bills require governance.

Concerns around technical debt, deskilling, code maintainability, or reduced job satisfaction. Gains are often strongest in debugging and understanding codebases rather than pure generation. Measurement is hard: Feels faster isn’t enough—teams need observability for cost-to-value ratios, PR impact, etc.

Use Opus for complex reasoning and planning, Sonnet for efficient execution. Agentic features; multi-step workflows, persistent context via CLAUDE.md, large context windows amplify gains over basic autocomplete. Adopt analytics for usage vs. outcomes; focus on high-value tasks. Early high-value coding use cases evolve; pair with training for best results.

Anthropic’s own research on real-world Claude conversations estimates that AI assistance reduces task completion time by around 80% in many cases, with software developers seeing the largest contributions to overall labor productivity about 19% of AI-attributable gains.

Internal Anthropic data shows engineers using Claude in ~60% of their work, reporting a 50% productivity boost; up from 20% the prior year, including more output volume and the ability to tackle tasks that wouldn’t have been done otherwise. Pull request merge rates have increased significantly in some cases.

Hong Kong’s Tokenized Green Bond Program has Moved from Concept to Large-scale Execution

By
Paul Ugbede Godwin
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0

Hong Kong Mortgage Corporation (HKMC), a government-owned financial services provider with around HK$221.8 billion in assets, is reportedly considering issuing up to HK$12 billion about US$1.5 billion in digital bonds using blockchain for issuance, trading, and settlement.

This could become the world’s largest such offering to date if it proceeds. According to people familiar with the matter as reported by Bloomberg, HKMC plans to market multi-currency digital bonds denominated in Hong Kong dollars and offshore renminbi (CNH) as early as next month. The bonds would leverage blockchain to enable faster settlement times, lower costs, and greater scalability compared to traditional bond processes.

HKMC is Hong Kong’s key player in the mortgage and housing finance sector, often issuing bonds to fund its operations and support the local property market. This would mark its first digital bond issuance. Hong Kong has been actively positioning itself as a digital asset hub in Asia, with prior government-backed tokenized green bonds and efforts to build supporting infrastructure such as a centralized digital asset platform.

Key potential benefits of blockchain-based digital or tokenized bonds include: Near-instant or T+0 settlement vs. traditional T+2 or longer. Reduced intermediaries and operational costs. Improved transparency and auditability via the immutable ledger. Easier fractionalization and programmability for future features. This fits into the broader Real World Assets (RWA) tokenization trend, where traditional financial instruments like bonds, real estate, or credit are brought on-chain.

While earlier digital bond pilots globally have been smaller often in the tens or hundreds of millions, a $1.5B issuance at this scale would signal maturing institutional and sovereign-level adoption, especially in Asia. The plan is still in the consideration and exploration phase — not yet confirmed as a firm issuance.

Details on exact structure, yield, tenor, or blockchain platform; public and permissioned, specific vendors remain undisclosed. Marketing could begin soon, with execution depending on investor demand, regulatory approvals via HKMA or SFC, and market conditions. Hong Kong’s supportive regulatory environment for digital assets has encouraged such moves, contrasting with more cautious approaches in some other jurisdictions.

Similar efforts have included HSBC’s earlier private-sector digital bond in Hong Kong and government tokenized issuances. This development highlights growing mainstream integration of blockchain in fixed-income markets, potentially paving the way for more efficient capital raising and secondary trading. If executed, it could set a benchmark for large-scale tokenized debt in the region and beyond.

Hong Kong has been a global pioneer in tokenized green bonds, using blockchain to issue, settle, and manage green and sustainable bonds. These digital or tokenized bonds represent traditional debt instruments on a blockchain, enabling benefits like faster settlement, reduced costs, greater transparency, and programmability.

The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) has driven this through initiatives like Project Genesis; a 2021 proof-of-concept with the BIS Innovation Hub and subsequent real-money issuances. The bonds fall under the HKSAR Government’s Sustainable Bond Programme, with proceeds funding eligible green and sustainable projects.

Hong Kong’s government has completed three tokenized green bond offerings: February 2023 issued World’s first tokenized government green bond. HK$800 million approx. US$100 million, 1-year, HKD-denominated. Priced at 4.05%. It demonstrated on-chain processes for the full bond lifecycle, shortening primary settlement from T+5 to T+1. Used a permissioned DLT platform including Goldman Sachs’ GS DAP for settlement.

February 2024: First multi-currency digital bond offering globally. Around US$750 million equivalent approx. HK$6 billion across HKD, RMB, USD, and EUR. Digitally native format; issued directly on-chain without traditional CSD conversion. Broad investor participation and scalability shown.

November 2025: Largest-ever digital bond issuance globally at the time — approx. HK$10 billion (US$1.3 billion) across four currencies (HKD, RMB, USD, EUR). Overwhelming demand with subscriptions exceeding HK$130 billion. Included tranches such as: HKD 2.5 billion 2-year at 2.5%. RMB 2.5 billion 5-year at 1.9%, USD 300 million 3-year at 3.633% and EUR 300 million 4-year at 2.512%.

This was the first government issuance allowing settlement with tokenized central bank money; e-HKD and e-CNY alongside traditional methods, further reducing risks and times. It followed the government’s Policy Statement 2.0 on digital assets and regularizes tokenized bond issuance. These issuances have been listed on the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong and supported by syndicates including banks like HSBC, Bank of China, Crédit Agricole, and Goldman Sachs.

Atomic settlement, reduced intermediaries, lower operational costs, and faster post-issuance processes like coupons, redemptions, secondary trading. Immutable ledger for better auditability; some use of ICMA’s Bond Data Taxonomy for standardization. Potential for fractional ownership and broader participation; multi-currency and multi-jurisdictional features.

Hong Kong’s legal and regulatory framework has proven compatible, with bonds governed by Hong Kong law. The HKMA has also launched a Digital Bond Grant Scheme up to HK$2.5 million per eligible issuance and maintains resources like EvergreenHub for knowledge sharing. A dedicated digital asset platform for tokenized bonds is planned for 2026.

This builds on Hong Kong’s push to become a digital asset and green finance hub in Asia. It aligns with the ongoing HKMC consideration of a potential record HK$12 billion (US$1.5 billion) multi-currency blockchain-based bond, which could surpass prior records if executed. HKMC itself has a Social, Green and Sustainability Financing Framework for potential future sustainable issuances.

Treasury and Fed Chiefs Warn Bank CEOs Against Anthropic’s Mythos AI as Pentagon Blacklisting Gains Fresh Legal Ground

By
Samuel Nwite
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0

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell called top bank executives to an urgent closed-door meeting this week to alert them to the cybersecurity dangers posed by Anthropic’s newly launched Mythos model, according to three people familiar with the gathering quoted by Reuters.

The Tuesday session at Treasury headquarters came just days after Anthropic released the powerful system — but stopped short of a full public rollout, explicitly citing the risk that it could reveal and weaponize previously unknown vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure.

The company has described Mythos as capable of identifying and exploiting weaknesses across “every major operating system and every major web browser.” It has already surfaced thousands of high-severity flaws, including bugs that had lain dormant for nearly three decades.

Last week, Anthropic confirmed it was engaged in ongoing discussions with U.S. government officials about the model’s “offensive and defensive cyber capabilities.” A source close to the company said it had proactively briefed senior officials and key industry players ahead of the limited launch.

The meeting’s purpose was to make sure the largest U.S. banks understand the emerging threats from Mythos and similar frontier models and are moving aggressively to fortify their systems. Most CEOs were already in Washington for other meetings, allowing Treasury to convene the group on short notice. Among those present were the chiefs of Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Goldman Sachs. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon was unable to attend.

Access to Mythos remains tightly controlled. Only about 40 carefully vetted technology companies, including Microsoft and Google, have been granted use under Anthropic’s Project Glasswing, an initiative aimed at using the model to hunt for and patch vulnerabilities in critical open-source code before adversaries can exploit them.

The gathering reflects deepening official anxiety that advanced AI has crossed a threshold where its ability to discover and chain exploits at machine speed could dramatically shift the balance between attackers and defenders.

For banks, which safeguard trillions in customer assets and sit at the center of the payments system, the stakes are existential. A single successful AI-augmented breach could cascade into systemic instability far beyond any one institution.

The warning to the financial sector lands amid a broader, intensifying campaign by the U.S. government to limit Anthropic’s reach in sensitive areas. The Pentagon shows no sign of easing its pressure on the company. Earlier this week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit denied Anthropic’s request for a temporary stay, upholding the Defense Department’s designation of the startup as a “supply chain risk.”

In unusually direct language, the appeals court wrote that the “equitable balance here cuts in favor of the government,” noting that the alternative would amount to “judicial management of how, and through whom, the Department of War secures vital AI technology during an active military conflict.”

That ruling keeps Anthropic locked out of Pentagon contracts and bars defense contractors from using Claude on military-related work, even as the company retains access to other federal agencies under a separate court injunction.

The blacklisting, the first of its kind against a major U.S. AI firm, was triggered by Anthropic’s refusal to grant the Pentagon unrestricted access to its models for “all lawful purposes,” a stance rooted in the company’s self-imposed guardrails against fully autonomous weapons and domestic mass surveillance.

Together, the Treasury-Fed briefing and the Pentagon’s legal victory paint a picture of a government increasingly determined to treat frontier AI models as dual-use technologies requiring careful containment. While Mythos is positioned by Anthropic as a tool for proactive defense, accelerating the discovery of vulnerabilities that human teams might miss for years, officials clearly worry it could just as easily empower sophisticated nation-state actors or criminal groups.

However, the message from Washington to banks was that the era of treating AI cyber tools as just another software upgrade is over. With Mythos already demonstrating breakthrough offensive capabilities, institutions are being told they must assume that adversaries, state-sponsored or otherwise, will soon have access to similar technology.

The question now is whether the financial sector can move fast enough to close the gaps before the model’s controlled release inevitably leaks into wider use.

In the broader AI arms race, Tuesday’s meeting and the appeals court’s reinforcement of the Pentagon’s stance underscore a growing reality: the U.S. government is no longer content to let the private sector self-regulate at the frontier. When models can both defend and attack the nation’s most critical systems, Washington intends to set the rules of engagement.

Ex-JPM Quant Chief Marko Kolanovic Dismisses Nasdaq’s Post-Ceasefire Rally as Built on Sand, Warns of Sharp Reversal

By
Samuel Nwite
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0

The Nasdaq Composite stormed higher on Thursday, leading a broad relief rally after President Donald Trump announced a two-week ceasefire with Iran.

The tech-heavy index jumped nearly 5 percent, outpacing the S&P 500’s 3.8 percent gain and the Dow’s 3.4 percent advance. For the first time since the conflict erupted, the Nasdaq has climbed back above its pre-war levels.

Invesco’s momentum technology ETF notched a fresh record high, fueled by a wave of buying in AI-related names and memory chip stocks that carry heavy weight in the fund.

But one of Wall Street’s most respected voices on market structure and macro risks isn’t impressed. Marko Kolanovic, who spent years as JPMorgan’s chief quantitative strategist before stepping back from the bank, took to X to call the move exactly what he thinks it is: a classic overreaction destined to unwind.

“The biggest gain ever on nothing (fake deal, Hormuz closed). So likely the biggest fade too …” he wrote, replying to a chart tracking the momentum ETF’s surge.

Kolanovic didn’t stop there. He warned that momentum tech “will crash if (when) talks yield nothing.” And as fresh signs of fragility emerged, he posed a blunt question: “who, apart from markets, still thinks negotiations are viable with this condition?”

The condition in question has stirred broader concern. Iranian parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf made clear that any serious negotiations must include a ceasefire in Lebanon and the release of Iran’s blocked assets. Trump, meanwhile, posted that Iran “better not be” charging fees to tankers moving through the Strait of Hormuz, insisting the current arrangement fell short of the agreement he announced.

U.S. negotiators, led by Vice President JD Vance, are still scheduled to sit down with their Iranian counterparts in person on Saturday. But the gap between the two sides’ public positions is widening by the hour.

Kolanovic’s skepticism carries weight because he has spent his career dissecting how markets price geopolitical risk — and how quickly sentiment can flip when reality intrudes. He has long argued that the kind of short-term relief rallies seen after headline ceasefires often prove unsustainable when underlying disputes remain unresolved.

This one, he believes, fits the pattern perfectly: a market desperate for de-escalation seized on Trump’s announcement while largely ignoring the fine print.

Memory chip stocks, which dominate the momentum ETF, are especially exposed in Kolanovic’s view. The sector has ridden the AI infrastructure boom for months, with investors betting that insatiable demand for high-bandwidth memory will keep capital spending on data centers red-hot. But those same chips are highly sensitive to any renewed supply-chain jitters or broader risk-off moves.

A breakdown in Saturday’s talks could quickly remind traders that geopolitics still matters — and that the Strait of Hormuz remains a chokepoint for global energy flows.

The rally itself was textbook relief trading: systematic funds rebalanced, short sellers covered, and retail piled in. Yet the speed and magnitude of the move, the largest seven-day gain for the momentum ETF in two decades, struck many seasoned traders as excessive given the ceasefire’s obvious fragility.

Oil prices, which had spiked during the fighting, eased only modestly, and defense stocks held most of their gains, suggesting the market isn’t fully convinced the threat has passed.

For now, the disconnect between Wall Street’s pricing and the on-the-ground reality in the Middle East is exactly what Kolanovic is highlighting. Markets are betting on diplomacy. He is betting that the diplomacy has a long way to go — and that when the optimism fades, the correction in the most crowded tech trades could be swift and painful.

The outcome of Saturday’s meeting will likely decide if he is right.

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