A brokerage account and a coin wallet do not cost the same thing, even when the fund's only job is to hold the coin. Of the 37 spot crypto ETFs ETFIQ can measure as of September 18, 2026, 21 finished within a point of the coin they hold, and the typical gap between a fund's return and its coin's return is 0.70%. That gap is not a single fee. It is the expense ratio, the cost of the trust creating and redeeming shares in blocks, and whatever price the market happened to put on the shares that day rather than on the coin itself, all folded into one number. It is also the only number on this desk that no sponsor publishes on its own site.
Nine coins sit across 48 exchange-traded funds, and the coins with several funds attached are where the comparison does real work. Bitcoin has 13 funds, and 12 of them land within a point of Bitcoin's own median return of −30.9%. VanEck's HODL comes closest at +0.1% over the coin, while Grayscale's GBTC sits furthest out at −1.0%. Ether has 11 funds, with 8 of 10 measurable ones within a point of Ether's −43.1% median; iShares' ETHB, a staked version, shows the widest gap at +2.8%, while Grayscale's ETHE matches the coin almost exactly at +0.0%. Solana, XRP, Avalanche, Dogecoin, Litecoin and Polkadot each carry fewer funds, and in several of these groups none of the funds land within a point of the coin. XRP's six funds, for instance, run from Franklin's XRPZ at +1.9% over the coin down to REX-Osprey's XRPR at −0.8%, with only one of the six falling inside a point.
Two trusts trade thinly enough that they close unchanged more than one day in twenty, and their listed difference against the coin reflects the days someone actually traded rather than a daily account of what the fund did. They are shown here rather than ranked against the others, because the arithmetic behind a thin trust's number does not mean the same thing as it does for a heavily traded one.
A separate set of 61 fund-windows cannot be stated as a simple subtraction at all. Once a return has compounded over a long enough stretch, subtracting one percentage from another stops describing anything real. ETHE since January 2020 returned +627.8% while Ether itself returned +1,854.4%; subtracting those numbers gives −1,227 points, a number with no meaning. For these windows the site instead prints the compounded gap between the two growth factors, which for that ETHE window comes to −62.8%.
A reader working from a brokerage screen can pull up any fund named here, check its listed return against the coin's return over the same dates, and see whether that fund sits inside or outside the one-point band this desk uses to flag a close tracking match.