On September 30, 2026, ETFIQ could measure 45 spot crypto ETFs against the coins they hold. Of those, 27 closed within a point of the coin's own return, and the typical gap across the group was 0.90%. That gap is not a tracking error in the usual sense. It is the fee, the cost of custody, and the friction of creating and redeeming shares in blocks, all compressed into a single number that is the only number on this desk the sponsor does not publish itself.
Nine coins sit across 48 funds, and the coins with several funds attached are where the number does its work. Bitcoin has 13 funds, and 11 of them finished within a point of Bitcoin's own −26.7% return, with a median difference of −0.4%. Ether has 11 funds, 9 within a point, median −0.8%. Since the coin's move is identical for every fund that holds it, whatever separates the funds within a coin group is the cost of holding it rather than owning it directly. Solana shows the opposite pattern: 8 funds, but only 1 within a point of Solana's +52.6%, and a median difference of +1.5%, meaning the typical Solana fund in this set ran ahead of the coin rather than behind it. XRP's six funds carry a median of −1.1%, with only 2 of 6 within a point. Avalanche's three funds cluster tightly, all 3 within a point, median −0.3%. Dogecoin and Litecoin show the widest gaps relative to their fund counts, at −1.5% and −1.7%, with none of their funds landing within a point of the coin.
Two trusts are quoted too thinly to sit in this comparison on equal footing, closing 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 across the full period, so they are shown with that caveat attached rather than ranked alongside the rest.
Twenty-seven fund-windows cannot state their gap by simple subtraction at all. Once a return has compounded long enough, subtracting one percentage number from another stops meaning anything. The clearest case is ETHE since January 2020: the fund returned +627.8% while Ether itself returned +1,854.4%. Subtracting those numbers produces a gap of -1,227 points, a number with no real-world interpretation. The compounded gap, calculated from the growth factors rather than the raw percentages, is -62.8%, and that is the number the site prints for those longer windows.
Readers working from this data are looking at a single, consistent measure: fund return minus coin return, computed from matched end-of-day closes, with the compounded version substituted wherever simple subtraction would mislead. On the live desk, a reader can check any individual ticker's current gap against its coin and see whether that fund still sits within a point, outside it, or in the thinly-quoted category.