This specification describes the data as published on Sep 11, 2026, covering 55 funds. Rebuilt every trading night.

Crypto ETF methodology

This is the working specification: what is in it, where every figure comes from, the arithmetic that produces it, what is checked every night, and what it cannot tell you. It is written to be checkable by someone who does not trust it.

Scope

55 US listed spot crypto ETFs across 10 coins: Avalanche, Bitcoin, Cardano, Chainlink, Dogecoin, Ether, Litecoin, Polkadot, Solana, XRP. A fund is here if it holds the coin itself through a custodian, if a ticker trades under it, and if the coin has a spot price series ETFIQ can read. A fund holding futures on the coin, or shares in companies that own it, or writing options on a company that owns it, is a different instrument answering a different question and is measured on the desk it belongs to.

These are not registered investment companies. A spot crypto ETF is a 1933 Act trust: it files a 10-K rather than an N-PORT, has a sponsor rather than an adviser, publishes no 19a-1 notice and appears in none of the SEC investment company files the other four desks here are built from. The industry and the regulator call them digital asset products; the sponsors have renamed most of them ETFs, and so does this site.

Sources

What is computed

Tracking difference

The fund’s total return minus the coin’s, over exactly the same two dates, in percentage points. It carries the fee, the custody cost, the friction of creating and redeeming in blocks, and whatever the market paid for the shares rather than for the coin, all of it together. It is the only figure on this desk the sponsor does not publish itself.

Why the two dates are the fund’s

Coins trade every day and the funds do not. Both returns are read at the dates the fund actually traded on, so a weekend move belongs to the Monday it is realized on. Taking the coin over the calendar window instead would hand the fund tracking error it did not cause.

When two returns may not be subtracted

Subtracting two returns states the gap between them only while both are small. $ETHE since January 2020 returned +622.69% while Ether returned +1,840.80%; the difference of the two is -1,227 points, which is correct arithmetic and describes the discount to net asset value that trust carried before it converted rather than anything about tracking. Every window therefore also carries the gap between the two growth factors, (1+fund)/(1+coin)-1, which is right at any size. On 208 of 239 fund-windows the two agree inside a point and the page prints the points figure; on the other 31 it prints the compounded one, and $ETHE reads -62.76%: the fund kept 37% of what holding the coin gave.

Thinly quoted trusts

A fund whose price sat unchanged on more than one trading day in twenty. A price that does not move is a price nobody traded at, so its difference against the coin describes the days somebody did trade rather than what the fund did. 3 today: GLNK, GSOL, OSOL. They are published with the reason and are never ranked against funds that trade every day. $OSOL shows +46 points against Solana over a year and closed unchanged on 202 of its 1,054 days.

The sponsor’s fee

These trusts file no 485BPOS and no prospectus XBRL, so the fee the rest of this site reads out of a structured field does not exist here. It is read from the sentence that states it in each trust’s own 10-K, S-1 or 424B3, and every fund page links the filing it came from. Grayscale writes it in the notes rather than a fee table, which is why four of the five fees this pipeline could not read at first were Grayscale’s, and they are the four that matter most: $GBTC charges ten times what Grayscale’s own mini trust charges on the same asset. The fee is already inside the tracking difference, so the two figures are the same cost stated twice, once as a promise and once as what happened.

Fee waivers

Almost every 2024 and 2025 launch waived its fee, for a period or up to an asset threshold. A waiver is why $IBIT sits a fifth of a point behind bitcoin rather than a quarter, and when it ends the difference widens by the amount waived on a page that would otherwise say nothing about it. The end date or the asset level is read from the filing where it is stated and printed with the fee.

Staking

Three answers that can disagree, and the site prints all three. What the chain allows: only a proof of stake chain pays anything, so no bitcoin, litecoin or dogecoin fund can, whatever a sponsor writes. XRP is neither proof of work nor proof of stake: its ledger settles by a consensus its validators are not paid for, so there is nothing to stake there either. What the filings say: read from the 10-K, S-1 or 424B3, with the form and its date beside the answer. A 10-K that recognizes staking reward income has staked, which is an audited number rather than an intention. What the prices did: a fund charging a fee cannot finish ahead of the price of the thing it holds unless it earned something on the way, and on these chains there is one thing to earn. Every Solana trust here is between three and seven percent ahead of Solana. Where the three disagree the fund’s page says so; today they do not.

Where to next

Cite this page. ETFIQ, Crypto ETF methodology, data as of Sep 11, 2026. https://etfiq.com/methodology/crypto Free to use with attribution; the underlying files are at Open data.