A share of a crypto ETF and the coin behind it should move together, but they rarely land on the exact same number. ETFIQ can measure 44 spot crypto ETFs as of September 21, 2026, and 29 of them finished within a point of the coin they hold. The typical gap, across all 44, is 0.60%. That gap is the fee, the custody cost, the friction of creating and redeeming shares in blocks, and whatever the market happened to pay for the shares rather than for the coin, all bundled into one number that no sponsor publishes on its own.
Nine coins are spread across 48 fund listings, and the coins with several funds attached are where the comparison earns its keep. Bitcoin has 13 funds, and 11 of them closed within a point of Bitcoin's own −25.3% return; the median difference across the group is +0.2%. VanEck's HODL was closest at +0.3%, Invesco's BTCO next closest at +0.1%, and Morgan Stanley's MSBT furthest off at −1.1%. Ether has 11 funds, median difference +0.0%, with Grayscale's ETH mini fund ahead of the coin by +1.1% and its older ETHE trailing by −0.5%. Solana's eight funds carry a median difference of −0.7%, with Bitwise's BSOL matching the coin exactly at +0.0% and Invesco's QSOL furthest off at −1.3%.
Some coins show a wider and more consistent spread. XRP's six funds have a median difference of −3.5%, and none of the four measurable ones landed within a point of the coin's +36.1% return. Avalanche's three funds carry a median of −1.6%, also with none within a point, and Dogecoin's three show −2.2%, again with none within a point. Litecoin, Chainlink, and Polkadot each have only one or two funds measured, so their single differences (+0.1%, −2.0%, −4.0%) describe that fund alone rather than a pattern.
Two trusts are quoted too thinly to compare on equal footing, closing unchanged on more than one trading day in twenty. Their difference against the coin is shown, but it reflects the days somebody happened to trade rather than what the fund actually did over the period, so it is published without being ranked against the rest.
Separately, 28 fund-windows cannot state their gap by simple subtraction. Once a return has compounded over years, subtracting two percentages stops meaning anything: ETHE since January 2020 returned +627.8% against Ether's own +1,854.4%, a subtraction that produces −1,227 points and describes nothing real. For these long windows the site instead prints the compounded gap between the two growth factors, which for that pair works out to −62.8%.
Readers can pull up any ticker on the live desk to see its fund return, its coin's return, and the difference recalculated from the same Tiingo closes used here.