Steven McClurg runs the only US spot exchange-traded fund holding Hedera, and that fund's own quarterly report shows HBAR worth $46,157,486 sitting against $105,908,469 of purchase cost. The figure comes from the Canary HBAR ETF's Form 10-Q filed Friday, August 7, covering the period ending June 30, 2026. On that same Friday, Grayscale filed to pull its own competing Hedera registration. McClurg is the founder and chief executive of Canary Capital, which makes him the man who won a race whose prize, on the last reported date available, was worth 43.58% of what it cost to assemble.
A companion piece on Phemex runs that balance sheet and the withdrawal filings in full. This one answers the other question, which is who McClurg actually is, what he built before Canary, and what a record of arriving first is worth when the assets he arrives first with keep falling. His name carries no Wikipedia page, and page one of a search for it is shared with a film visual-effects artist. The record underneath it is far more specific than that suggests.
Why Grayscale's Withdrawal Put McClurg on the Board
Grayscale Hedera Trust ETF, registered with the SEC under CIK 0002084948, filed a Registration Withdrawal Request against file number 333-290129 on Friday, August 7, 2026. A withdrawal request is a filing the issuer makes on its own initiative. Nobody rejected anything, and nothing in that document says a Hedera ETF cannot be approved in the United States. It says one issuer stopped pursuing one product, and other issuers are reported to be continuing with their own Hedera filings.
Canary had already been there for more than nine months. The Canary HBAR ETF began trading on Nasdaq under the ticker HBR on October 28, 2025, with an initial share purchase date of October 27 recorded in the trust's financial statements.
The head start runs back further than the listing. The trust was formed as a Delaware statutory trust on September 24, 2024, one week before Canary Capital made its public debut on October 1, 2024 by launching the first dedicated HBAR investment vehicle in the United States, a private placement for qualified investors. Hedera was not a later addition to a fund lineup that needed filling out. It was the first product the firm ever shipped, before the firm had shipped anything else at all.
The Career That Built a Serial First Mover
McClurg founded Canary in the autumn of 2024 after roughly six months at CoinShares, which had acquired the business he built before it. His firm's own account describes the plan as a hedge fund first, with the ETF filings added later as a bet on how a change of administration would reshape approvals. Four applications went in covering Solana, XRP, Litecoin and Hedera, deliberately skipping Bitcoin and Ethereum on the reasoning that the approved categories were already crowded.
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Firm
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Role
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Timing
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Canary Capital
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Founder and chief executive officer
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Autumn 2024 to present
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CoinShares
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Remained after the acquisition, roughly six months
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March 2024 to autumn 2024
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Valkyrie Investments
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Co-founder and chief investment officer
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Until the CoinShares deal closed March 12, 2024
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Galaxy Digital
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Managing director, asset management and public funds
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After the Theseus acquisition
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Theseus Capital
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Founder of a blockchain asset management platform, acquired by Galaxy Digital
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Before Valkyrie
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Guggenheim Partners
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Managing director, fixed income and private equity portfolio strategy
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Before Theseus
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Two of those rows sit on much firmer ground than the rest, and the difference is worth stating rather than smoothing over. The Valkyrie and CoinShares rows are confirmed by CoinShares' own completion announcement, which records the deal closing on March 12, 2024 and bringing roughly $530 million of assets across four funds into CoinShares. The Guggenheim, Theseus and Galaxy rows trace to Canary's own leadership page and to conference speaker profiles built from the same supplied text, not to independent reporting. The same applies to his education, listed as a Master of Science and an MBA from Pepperdine University with an adjunct teaching role there. Treat those as a self-described resume rather than a verified one.
What matters commercially is the Valkyrie line. McClurg co-founded that firm with Leah Wald and served as its chief investment officer through the launch of one of the first US spot Bitcoin ETFs, the product that arrived in the January 2024 approval wave and traded under the ticker BRRR. Getting one of those to market is the credential every Canary filing since has leaned on, and it is worth understanding how a spot Bitcoin ETF is actually structured before weighing what that credential does and does not mean. Canary's page also credits him as lead portfolio manager of the Valkyrie Bitcoin Miners ETF and calls it the top-performing ETF of 2023, a ranking claim we could not confirm against an independent source and are therefore attributing rather than asserting.
What the June 30 Filing Says About His Flagship Fund
Everything below is a snapshot dated June 30, 2026. It is not current, it does not reflect anything that has happened in the six weeks since, and the fund's figures on any given day now will differ.
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Line item, as printed
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June 30, 2026
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December 31, 2025
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Investments in HBAR, at value
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$46,157,486
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$50,616,211
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Investments in securities, at cost
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$105,908,469
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$87,975,693
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Net assets
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$46,117,098
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$50,568,813
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Net asset value per share
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$9.47
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$14.62
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Shares outstanding
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4,870,000
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3,460,000
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Hedera held
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663,209,584 HBAR
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473,456,805 HBAR
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The filing reports a total return at net asset value of -20.99% over three months and -35.21% over six, against a sponsor fee of 0.95% charged annually on the trust's HBAR holdings. By our own arithmetic on those printed numbers, the position was worth 43.58% of cost, the unrealized loss ran to $59,750,983, and the implied average cost works out near $0.1597 per HBAR against a June 30 carrying value of roughly $0.0696. HBAR itself traded around $0.0675 on CoinGecko's Hedera page when we pulled it at 05:40 UTC on Tuesday, August 11, 2026, which puts the cost basis well above where the token has been sitting since.
And then there is the row almost nobody reads. Hedera held rose by roughly 189.8 million tokens over those six months, shares outstanding rose by 1.41 million, and cost rose by nearly $17.9 million. Every one of those increases happened while the value of the holdings was falling, which means creations kept arriving through the drawdown rather than drying up in it. That is a demand signal the performance line conceals entirely, and it is the reason reading ETF inflows and outflows separately from returns is a habit worth building.
Winning the Race Is Not the Same as Winning the Trade
HBR did not launch by itself. On that same October 28, 2025 date, Canary listed the Canary Litecoin ETF under the ticker LTCC, described at the time as the first US-listed spot ETF for a digital asset outside Bitcoin and Ethereum. The firm now runs five live funds spanning Hedera, Litecoin, XRP, a Marinade-staked Solana product and a staked SUI product, which is a lot of shelf space for an issuer that did not exist in 2023.
The two halves of this story reconcile through a structural point most readers skip. A spot ETF delivers the coin's price minus the sponsor fee and nothing else, with no manager skill anywhere inside the return. McClurg's only real decisions are which asset to file for and when to file, never how to trade it once the fund is open. Because the 0.95% fee is levied on holdings rather than gains, the sponsor's revenue tracks assets under management instead of performance.
A fund can therefore be down 35% over six months and still be a considerably better business than a fund that never launched. Think of it as owning the only filling station on a road nobody is driving down yet. The investors in HBR are underwater while the issuer that reached the category first owns the only listed product in it. Both of those things are true at once, and they point in opposite directions.
What His Record Says About the Next Altcoin ETF Launch
The pattern across his filings is asset selection ahead of regulatory clarity rather than conviction arriving after it. That approach produces a specific, repeatable outcome, and it is the one worth carrying into the next altcoin ETF launch you see announced.
First-mover launches concentrate assets to an extreme degree. When Solana ETFs crossed $1 billion in assets, the overwhelming majority of the flow landed in a single fund rather than spreading across the category. By the time a large traditional manager arrives, as with Morgan Stanley's Solana ETF filing, the incumbent product already holds the distribution. That dynamic is why an issuer will file for an asset it has no price view on whatsoever.
The second lesson is blunter. A launch date tells you almost nothing about a return, and HBR is the cleanest available proof of it. Being first to list Hedera in a US wrapper did not make Hedera go up, and no amount of structural advantage at the issuer level transfers to the person who bought the shares.
McClurg belongs to a small group of people directing very large sums with almost no public profile attached, the same category that made Leopold Aschenbrenner worth profiling. The assets get every headline while the person selecting them gets none.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Steven McClurg?
Steven McClurg is the founder and chief executive of Canary Capital, a Tennessee-based digital asset investment firm that made its public debut on October 1, 2024. Before Canary he co-founded Valkyrie Investments and served as its chief investment officer through the launch of one of the first US spot Bitcoin ETFs, and Valkyrie's fund business was acquired by CoinShares in March 2024.
What is the Canary HBAR ETF?
The Canary HBAR ETF trades on Nasdaq under the ticker HBR and holds spot Hedera directly rather than futures contracts. It began trading on October 28, 2025 and charges an annual sponsor fee of 0.95% on its HBAR holdings, which is high relative to spot Bitcoin ETFs that typically sit in the 0.20% to 0.25% range.
Is there more than one Hedera ETF in the United States?
HBR is the only US spot Hedera ETF trading as of Tuesday, August 11, 2026. Grayscale's competing Hedera registration was withdrawn by the issuer on August 7, 2026, and other issuers have been reported as still pursuing their own Hedera filings, so the category holds one product rather than being closed to new ones.
Why is the Canary HBAR ETF down so far?
A spot ETF returns the underlying asset's price move minus its fee, so the fund is down because HBAR is down, not because of any decision the manager made after launch. The trust reported a total return at net asset value of -35.21% for the six months ending June 30, 2026, which tracks Hedera's own decline over that window.
Bottom Line
The number worth watching in Canary's next filing is not the return, it is the share count. Shares outstanding stood at 4,870,000 on June 30 against 3,460,000 six months earlier, and that direction is the whole argument for McClurg's approach. If shares keep rising while net asset value falls, capital is still arriving and being first to the category is paying the issuer exactly as designed. If the share count starts shrinking, redemptions have turned on and the shelf-space advantage stops covering the performance. The 10-Q covering the September 30 quarter is the next place that answer appears. Arriving first was a business decision about distribution, never a price forecast, and the $59.8 million gap between what this fund paid and what it holds is what it looks like when those two things get confused.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial or investment advice. Cryptocurrency trading involves substantial risk. Always conduct your own research before making trading decisions.
