A share of a crypto ETF is not the coin. It is a claim on the coin, wrapped in a fund structure, and that wrapper has a price of its own. On September 24, 2026, ETFIQ measured 35 spot crypto ETFs against the coins they hold, and 26 of them closed within a point of what the coin itself did. The typical gap, across all 35, was 0.30%. That gap is the fee, the cost of custody, the mechanics of creating and redeeming shares in blocks, and whatever else separated what the market paid for the shares from what it paid for the coin. It is the one number on this desk that no sponsor publishes directly.
The 48 funds on the table cover nine coins, and the more crowded a coin gets, the more that gap is worth reading. Bitcoin has 13 funds, and 10 of the 12 measurable ones sat within a point of the coin's own return, with a median difference of −0.2%. Ether has 11 funds, 9 of 11 within a point, median −0.1%. In both cases the coin's move for the period was identical for every fund that holds it; the only thing distinguishing one Bitcoin fund from another is what it cost to hold the wrapper rather than the coin. Grayscale's GBTC shows the widest Bitcoin gap on the table, at −1.1% against Bitcoin's own −25.6%, while funds such as EZBC, HODL, BTC, ARKB, IBIT, BITB and FBTC all cluster at −0.2%.
Not every coin behaves this way. Dogecoin's three funds, GDOG, BWOW and TDOG, all ran ahead of the coin, by 3.7%, 3.6% and 3.3% respectively, none within a point, and the coin table puts Dogecoin's median difference at +3.6%. Chainlink's single fund, CLNK, ran 1.8% ahead of the coin, and Polkadot's single fund, TDOT, also ran 1.8% ahead. XRP's six funds are tighter: five of five sit within a point, with a median difference of +0.7%.
Two trusts on the table are flagged as quoted too thinly to compare, meaning they closed unchanged on more than one trading day in twenty; their difference against the coin reflects the days somebody actually traded rather than what the fund did over the full period, and they are shown with that caveat rather than measured against the others.
Separately, 42 fund-windows could not have their gap stated by simple subtraction at all. Once a return compounds long enough, subtracting one total return from another stops meaning anything: $ETHE since January 2020 returned +627.8% against Ether's own +1,854.4%, a subtraction of -1,227 points that describes nothing real. For those windows the site instead prints the gap between the two compounded growth factors, which for that ETHE window comes to -62.8%.
A reader can look up any single fund on the live desk and see whether its difference against its coin sits inside or outside that one-point band, and whether it was measured by subtraction or by the compounded-gap method the summary describes.