On September 25, 2026, ETFIQ measured 43 spot crypto ETFs against the coins they hold. Thirty-two of them closed within a point of their coin's move, and the typical gap across the group was 0.70%. That gap is not a single named cost. It is the fee, the custody arrangement, the mechanics of creating and redeeming shares in blocks, and whatever the market happened to pay for the shares that day rather than for the coin itself, all folded together. It is also the one number here that no sponsor publishes on its own fact sheet.
Nine coins sit under 48 funds in total, and Bitcoin and Ether each carry more than ten of them. That crowding is where the difference is worth reading, because the coin's own move is identical for every fund that holds it. Bitcoin's median difference across its 13 funds was −0.5%, with 11 of them landing within a point. Ether's 11 funds showed a median difference of −0.7%, with 10 of 11 within a point. Individual results ranged from Osprey Bitcoin Trust (OBTC), which closed +3.0% ahead of Bitcoin's −22.9% move, and iShares Staked Ethereum Trust ETF (ETHB), +1.0% ahead of Ether's +70.7%, down to 21shares Polkadot Staking ETF (TDOT), which finished −3.2% behind Polkadot's +42.5%, the widest single gap on the list and the one Polkadot fund that missed the one-point mark entirely.
Solana's eight funds show the widest spread as a group: a median difference of −1.5%, with only 3 of 8 within a point of Solana's +70.0% move. XRP sits at the other end, with a median difference of +0.4% and all six of its funds within a point of the coin's +49.7% return. Dogecoin's three funds posted a median difference of −1.2%, with only one of three within a point.
Two trusts are quoted too thinly for this comparison to mean much: they closed unchanged on more than one trading day in twenty, so their difference reflects the days somebody happened to trade rather than what the fund actually did over the period. They are shown here with that caveat rather than placed alongside the rest.
Thirty-nine fund-windows could not be measured by simple subtraction at all. Once a return compounds far enough, subtracting two percentages stops meaning anything. Grayscale Ethereum Staking ETF (ETHE), for instance, returned +627.8% since January 2020 against Ether's own +1,854.4%. Subtracting those numbers gives −1,227 points, a number with no real-world interpretation. The compounded gap between the two growth factors is −62.8%, and that is the number the desk publishes for windows like this one.
Readers can look up any fund's own ticker on the live desk to see its current difference against the coin it holds, updated as new closes come in.