On September 30, 2026, ETFIQ could measure 45 spot crypto ETFs against the coin each one holds. Of those, 27 closed within a point of their coin, and the typical gap across all measurable funds was 0.90%. That gap is not a single named fee. It is the fund's expense charge, the cost of custody, the friction of creating and redeeming shares in blocks, and whatever the market paid for the shares that day rather than for the coin itself, all folded together. It is also the one number on this desk that no sponsor publishes directly.
Nine coins are spread across 48 funds, and the coins with several funds attached are where the comparison does useful work. Bitcoin has 13 funds, and 11 of them closed within a point of Bitcoin's own −26.8% return, with a median difference of −0.4%. Ether has 11 funds, 9 within a point, median −0.8% against Ether's −35.2%. Solana's eight funds sit apart: only one, BSOL at +2.0%, landed within a point of Solana's +52.6%, and the coin's median difference across its funds was +1.5%, the widest of the larger groups and the only one running positive rather than negative. XRP's six funds carried a median difference of −1.1%, with only two of six within a point of the coin's +41.6%. Avalanche, with three funds, was the tightest group: all three within a point, median −0.3%. Dogecoin's three funds and Litecoin's two funds both missed their coin by wider margins, with medians of −1.5% and −1.7%, and none within a point. Chainlink and Polkadot each carry one fund; Polkadot's TDOT closed at −0.3% against the coin's +47.8%.
Within the full list, the individual fund differences for the September 30 window ranged from BSOL's +2.0% down to TDOG's −1.7%, with most bitcoin and ether funds clustered close to zero and the smaller-coin funds more scattered.
Two trusts in this set are quoted too thinly to be compared on equal footing: they closed unchanged on more than one trading day in twenty. Their difference against the coin reflects the days someone actually traded them rather than what the fund did over the full period, so ETFIQ publishes the numbers without ranking them against the rest.
Separately, 27 fund-windows cannot state their gap by simple subtraction once either return has compounded enough that the two numbers no longer describe the same thing. ETHE's return since January 2020 was +627.8% against Ether's own +1,854.4%; subtracting those gives -1,227 points, a number that means nothing. The number that does describe the gap is the compounded difference, -62.8%, and that is what appears for those longer windows.
A reader can check any single ticker's own number, both the fund's return and the coin's, on the live desk and see today's gap update in real time.