Hedera ETF Explained: Canary HBR, the 0.95% Fee, Staking and How Flows Work

TL;DR. There is exactly one spot Hedera ETF in the United States: the Canary HBAR ETF, ticker HBR, trading on Nasdaq since 28 October 2025 with a 0.95% sponsor fee, the highest of any US spot crypto fund. On 16 September 2026 it held $55.2m of net assets at a $9.92 NAV, about 5.57m shares and roughly 136 HBAR per share. The share count has risen every quarter since launch even though HBAR fell from about $0.185 on listing day to about $0.074 in mid-September, a drop near 60%. Since 12 June 2026 the fund stakes all of its HBAR, and every reward goes to Canary rather than to shareholders. Grayscale withdrew its rival filing on 7 August 2026, so HBR is the whole US market.

What a spot Hedera ETF is

A spot Hedera ETF is an exchange-listed trust that buys HBAR, the native coin of the Hedera network, and issues shares against the coins it holds. You buy the shares through an ordinary brokerage account; a custodian holds the keys; the sponsor runs the trust and takes a fee. The share price tracks the coin less that fee.

The plumbing is the same as every spot crypto fund. Authorised participants create shares in baskets of 10,000 when the share price runs above the value of the HBAR behind it, and redeem baskets when it slips below. Those creations and redemptions are what a "flow" measures; two investors trading HBR between themselves move it by zero.

One line buyers skip: HBR isn't registered under the Investment Company Act of 1940. It's a commodity-style trust, the same legal shape as every US spot Bitcoin fund, without a mutual fund's protections; Bitcoin ETF versus spot Bitcoin sets out what that means.

What Hedera and HBAR actually are

Hedera is a public network that doesn't use a blockchain. It runs on hashgraph, a consensus algorithm in which nodes gossip about what they've heard from other nodes, and every node can then compute the same transaction order without a leader or a mining race. Canary's 10-K calls the result asynchronous Byzantine fault tolerant, or aBFT: no small group of nodes can steer the ordering, and consensus is final within seconds. The codebase, hashgraph included, now lives at the Linux Foundation's LF Decentralized Trust as the Hiero project.

Governance is the unusual part. The network is run by the Hedera Council, up to 39 large organisations that each host a consensus node. Members serve three-year terms, at most two in a row, except Swirlds, the company that patented hashgraph in 2016, which holds a permanent seat. The 10-K counted 31 members in February 2026; in September the council's site listed 34, among them Google, IBM, Dell, Deutsche Telekom, Nomura, Ubisoft and BitGo. That last name matters here: BitGo is also one of the two custodians holding the ETF's coins.

HBAR pays the fees for every transaction and is the stake behind the network's proof-of-stake security. Any account can stake to a consensus node, and Canary's 10-K puts the two points a Solana or Polkadot holder would envy in one sentence: "HBAR remains liquid, with no lock-up, bonding, or slashing." Supply was fixed at 50 billion at launch; about 43.8 billion were in circulation on 17 September 2026, when the coin traded near $0.076, a market value of about $3.3bn and 31st on CoinGecko. Its all-time high was $0.569 in September 2021, so an ETF buyer is buying that drawdown along with the technology.

The one US fund: Canary HBR

Canary Capital's HBAR ETF started trading on Nasdaq on Tuesday 28 October 2025, in the middle of the federal government shutdown: Canary had refiled its S-1 without the customary delaying amendment, which lets a registration go effective on its own after 20 days. The same route put its Litecoin fund LTCC on the tape the same morning; the Litecoin ETF explainer covers that twin. The seed came from The HBAR Foundation: 40,000 shares at $25 on 27 October, paid in HBAR.

Sources: Canary fund page (16 September 2026), 2025 10-K, June 2026 10-Q. Terms change; check the current prospectus.

What the quarterly filings show

Canary doesn't publish a flow history, but the trust's quarterly SEC filings give a clean picture of what happened to the money.

Read the columns against each other. Net assets went sideways for nine months, $50.6m to $50.4m to $46.1m to $55.2m, which looks like a fund going nowhere. The share count says the opposite: it rose from 3.46m to roughly 5.57m, and the first half of 2026 recorded 1,410,000 shares created and none redeemed, worth $18.4m at the prices of the day. Money kept arriving through a 60% drawdown. Conviction or averaging down, the filings can't say; what they do say is that the buyers didn't leave.

The last column is the one to watch. HBAR per share fell from 136.8 to 136.2 in six months, and that decline is the sponsor fee and nothing else: 0.95% a year is about 0.24% a quarter, and 136.8 less 0.24% is 136.5.

Staking: who gets the reward

This is where HBR differs from most staking-asset funds, and the difference isn't in the fee table. The prospectus lets the sponsor stake the trust's HBAR and says that "any staking rewards generated from the Trust's HBAR holdings will accrue to the benefit of the Sponsor as partial compensation for its services to the Trust, and will not accrue to the Trust or benefit Shareholders".

Then it happened. An 8-K dated 12 June 2026 announced the arrangement, and the June 10-Q reports that all 663,209,584 HBAR held at quarter-end were staked, and that from 12 to 30 June they generated 649,021 HBAR of rewards worth $45,165, "the sole property of the Sponsor". On our arithmetic that annualises to roughly 2%, about twice the 0.95% fee. Treat it as an estimate from one short period, not a published yield.

Compare the alternatives. 21Shares' Polkadot fund pays staking rewards to shareholders in cash each quarter; Grayscale's HYPG keeps a quarter of rewards and passes the rest into NAV; even Canary's own Sui fund SUIS stakes for its holders. HBR is built the other way round: the shareholder carries the staking risk on the trust's coins and receives none of the return. For how the SEC came to allow staking inside the wrapper at all, see Ethereum ETF staking explained.

The 0.95% fee in context

Canary charges 0.95% on HBR and LTCC, the top of the US spot crypto range and roughly three times the going rate for a new altcoin fund. The full list of 2026 crypto ETFs has every row; these frame HBR.

Two things follow. A 65 basis point gap compounds: over five years on a flat coin price, HBR's holder ends up about 3.2% poorer than the holder of a 0.30% product, before the foregone staking. And Canary can charge it because nobody else lists a US HBAR fund.

Europe got there first, with exchange-traded notes: debt securities collateralised by HBAR rather than trusts. Valour listed a physically backed Hedera product on Börse Frankfurt and added Euronext Amsterdam on 18 December 2024, seeded with $5m from The Hashgraph Group. 21Shares followed with HDRA on Euronext Amsterdam and Paris in June 2025 at a 2.50% fee, custodied at BitGo and staked, with the yield accrued into NAV; on 17 September 2026 its page showed $522,000 of assets, about 1% of HBR. Neither is tracked on cryptoetf.today, which covers US-listed funds only.

Why there's only one

On 17 September 2025 the SEC approved generic listing standards for commodity-based trust shares, which turned the multi-year Bitcoin fight into a 20-day filing for HBAR. Grayscale was the serious rival. It filed an S-1 for a Grayscale Hedera Trust ETF on 9 September 2025, proposing to list on Nasdaq under the symbol HBAR. On 7 August 2026 it filed a Form RW withdrawing that registration, saying only that the sponsor "does not intend to proceed", and pulled its Cardano and Polkadot filings the same day. HBAR traded near $0.068 that day, 63% below HBR's listing price, and it's hard to see a second sponsor paying its way in a $50m market at a lower fee. As of September 2026 no other US spot Hedera fund trades.

How Hedera ETF flows are computed on a single-fund asset

No flow aggregator covers Canary's funds, so the series on this site is built from Canary's own page. Every business day cryptoetf.today snapshots the net assets and NAV per share at canaryetfs.com/hbr/, derives the share count, and computes the day's flow:

shares(T) = net assets(T) / NAV(T), rounded to the nearest 10,000-share basket

flow(T) = (shares(T) - shares(T-1)) x NAV(T)

The rounding step exists because the page shows NAV to the cent: a raw division prints 5,567,264 shares where the real figure is 5,570,000. The formula uses the same day's share count on both sides because Canary, unlike Grayscale and BlackRock, publishes counts that already include that day's creations, so Tuesday's flow is known on Tuesday evening rather than Wednesday.

Three things follow from having one fund:

1. Most days are zero. One basket is 10,000 shares, about $99,000 at a $9.92 NAV, and the whole fund is 557 baskets. A day with no basket created or redeemed prints zero, and that's the default state, not a sell-off.
2. No rotation noise. On Bitcoin, an outflow from one fund and an inflow to a cheaper one nets to nothing and looks dramatic. HBAR has no cheaper fund to rotate into, so every print is new money or a real exit.
3. Price and flow diverge. The fund holds around 750m HBAR on our estimate, roughly 1.7% of circulating supply. ETF creations don't set the HBAR price; they measure one kind of buyer: regulated, long-only, US-listed.

The series tells you whether that buyer is still turning up. It's updated every business day on the Hedera ETF flows page, and it feeds the composite CEFI sentiment index, though there's no per-asset index for Hedera. For reading a young series, how to read Hyperliquid ETF flows applies almost line for line.

The risks worth naming

Council concentration

The 10-K says it plainly: "if a majority of Council members act in concert, they could exert significant control over the direction of the network". The pitch to enterprises is the risk to a token holder: you own a coin whose rules are set by a board you can't vote for.

Fee drag and foregone staking

At 0.95% a year with staking rewards routed to the sponsor, HBAR per share can only fall. A self-custodied holder pays no fee and earns the reward the fund's shareholders give up. On our estimate the wrapper costs roughly 3% of assets a year in fee plus foregone yield, the price of not running a wallet.

Small-fund liquidity

A $55m fund trades with wider spreads than a Bitcoin giant: Canary's page showed a 30-day spread of 0.40% and a 0.59% premium to NAV on 16 September 2026. Use limit orders. Funds this small can also close, and a liquidation is a forced taxable sale at that week's price, as Bitwise's Dogecoin fund showed in October 2026.

Asset risk

HBAR fell about 60% between listing day and mid-September 2026 and sits 87% below its 2021 high; no wrapper changes that.

Who a Hedera ETF is for

HBR solves three problems: it fits inside an IRA or 401(k) that can't hold a coin, it satisfies mandates that bar self-custodied crypto, and it removes the wallet. In exchange you pay 0.95% a year, trade only during US market hours, and hand the staking reward to Canary. In a retirement account it's the only US route to HBAR. If you can run a wallet and would hold for years, the coin itself keeps the fee and the reward. Either way, the daily number on the Hedera ETF flows page is a clean read on one kind of buyer, with nothing else mixed in.

FAQ

Sources and further reading

• Canary Capital, HBR fund page: fee, custodians, NAV, net assets, premium and spread, 16 September 2026 — canaryetfs.com.
• Canary HBAR ETF, Form 10-Q to 30 June 2026: holdings, shares, staking start and rewards to the sponsor — sec.gov.
• Canary HBAR ETF, Form 10-K for 2025: first trading day, seed investment, Hedera Council and the concentration risk factor — sec.gov.
• Grayscale Hedera Trust ETF, Form RW withdrawal, 7 August 2026 — sec.gov.
• Hedera Council FAQ: 39-seat cap, Swirlds seat, Hiero, 50bn supply — hederacouncil.org.
• 21Shares HDRA product page: fee, custody, staking, assets — 21shares.com.