SEC Filing Proposes Defiance ETF Tracking Crypto Revenue Tokens
A 6th November filing proposes an ETF whose index, as of 30th September, put 61.62% of its weight in Hyperliquid (HYPE) and Pump.fun (PUMP).
Tidal Trust V, a US fund company registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), filed a post-effective amendment on 6th November to add one new fund to its registration. The filing is a form called 485APOS, and its text names the product the Defiance CoinDesk Crypto Revenue Leaders ETF. It would track the CoinDesk Revenue Leaders Index, which picks up to ten crypto assets by how much revenue their networks or protocols earn and pass to token holders.
A Filing That Is Not Yet In Force
The document is marked "subject to completion". It says in capitals that the information "is not complete and may be changed" and that the securities may not be sold until the registration statement is effective. The filing ticks the box for taking effect 75 days after filing. On our own count, that date is 20th January 2027. The filing says the SEC has not approved or disapproved the securities.
Several parts are blank. The ticker, the listing exchange, the prospectus date and the management fee, shown as "0.[ ]%", are all still to be filled in. Nothing in the filing says the fund will launch, or when.
How The Index Picks And Weights Tokens
The index starts from the CoinDesk 100, a list of large crypto assets, and removes stablecoins and memecoins as classified by CoinDesk Data. Each quarter it ranks what remains by on-chain revenue over the previous 180 days. To qualify, an asset must have passed at least 50% of that revenue to token holders through buybacks, fee burns (permanently removing tokens), payouts or staking.
Weights follow revenue, with a 40% cap set at each reconstitution. The filing lists these weights as of 30th September 2026: Hyperliquid 35.55%, Pump.fun 26.07%, Tron (TRX) 18.35%, Uniswap (UNI) 4.72%, Aerodrome (AERO) 4.42%, Chainlink (LINK) 3.19%, Ethereum (ETH) 2.93%, Lighter (LIT) 1.89%, Aster (ASTER) 1.60% and Solana (SOL) 1.28%. The first two sum to 61.62%, the first three to 79.97%.
The cap applies only when weights are set, so the filing says a holding can drift above 40% as prices move.
How Revenue Reaches Holders In Two Cases
The filing says the index's mechanisms "do not necessarily involve cash payments to token holders". The two largest holdings show what that means in practice.
Hyperliquid's own fee documentation says its fees go to the community, naming HLP, the assistance fund and deployers. It says the assistance fund converts trading fees to HYPE automatically and that the HYPE it holds is burned. The page does not state what share of fees goes to the assistance fund, so this article does not give one.
Pump.fun's PUMP token page says half of its revenue buys PUMP on the open market and burns it. Its methodology note says that as of 28th April 2026, 50% of revenue is "programmatically locked and allocated to be burned for one year".
The figures that follow are Pump.fun's own, read on its page on 7th November at about 07:24 UTC. The page warns that, since custom pairs launched, its fee dashboard "does not correctly reflect the revenue and buyback amount". With that caveat, it shows $502.99M in cumulative buybacks, 17.581% of supply burned and annualised revenue of $643.91M. It also says PUMP "does not represent a right to revenues".
In the ten days of its table, the share of revenue spent on buybacks ranged from 37.68% (4th November) to 63.57% (5th November).
What The Fund Would Hold
The filing says the fund does not invest directly in crypto assets. It would use swaps (contracts to exchange returns with a counterparty), futures, listed options and other exchange-traded products. It may invest up to 25% of assets through a Cayman Islands subsidiary, tested at the end of each quarter. Its adviser is Tidal Investments LLC, and Defiance ETFs, LLC is named as sponsor under a fund sponsorship agreement.
The filing is also explicit about risk. It names Hyperliquid, Pump.fun and Tron as large index shares and describes a "Revenue Metric Risk": revenue earned by a protocol does not necessarily reach token holders, and a protocol "may generate substantial revenue while its token declines in value". It adds that repurchases do not assure returns, the fund is non-diversified, and holders could lose their entire investment. It says the Pump.fun exposure depends on how many tokens are created and how heavily they are traded on the platform, memecoins included.
What Is Unclear
The filing does not give a launch date, fees or a listing venue. Swap counterparties are not named in the sections read. The weights are a 30th September snapshot, and the index is rebuilt at the end of January, April, July and October, so the 6th November filing does not show current holdings. The fund has no trading history to compare with.
